Google Analytics makes Demo Account available to all
[This article was first published on analytics for fun, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
Playing with GA data is much much easier now.Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
Last week biggest news was definitely Google making a Demo Google Analytics Account available to everyone. As the word “demo” says, the main purpose is demonstrating all the features and reports GA offers, and become a learning platform for analysts. But it´s actually real numbers! All the data available come from the Google Merchandise Store (which sells Google branded merchandise), so you can apply your favorite algorithm, find valuable insights from the data and show off your analytics skills to others.
Click on this link to access the GA Demo Account.
- If you already have a Google Analytics account, Google will add the demo account to it (then you can access it via the Home tab in Google Analytics).
- If you do not have a Google Analytics account, it will create one for you in association with your Google account (yes you need a Google account first) and add the demo account to it.
What can you do with the GA Demo Account?
As I said it´s real data from an E-commerce site. So, you will be able to see standard reports such as audience, traffic acquisition and behavior as well as transactions data and shopping behavior throughout the visitor journey. Most GA advanced features are already implemented and these includes:
- Enhanced Ecommerce
- Goals (there a couple set up) and Funnel
- Filters
- Demographic & Interests reports
- Adwords integrated reports
- Search Console reports
- Site Search data
- Content Groupings
- Calculated metrics
As an analyst (either new or more experienced one), here are a couple of things you would like to do:
- familiarize with the Admin interface and all the account/property/view features available (remember you will have just “Read & Analyze” rights you won´t be able to implement any change).
- dive into all the standard reports and study visitors flow throughout the website. Create your own segments, custom reports and dashboards.
- analyse conversions and shopping behavior (Enhanced Ecommerce section).
- if you are an educator, GA Partner or University teaching digital analytics, the GA Demo account will be your best friend in classes,
- you are a blogger like me, you might want real e-commerce data to build proof of concepts, dashboards, or perform powerful analysis.
…and if you are a R user?
Of course you can use R to analyse the GA Demo data. It´s real data from the Google Merchandise Store so you might be interested in applying machine learning algorithms, or create beautiful visualizations and dashboards.
In more than one occasion in this blog I shared examples of GA dashboards made with R and Shiny. Some readers asked me for the original dataset in order to reproduce the code, cause they did not have access to any GA account. With the demo account available, now it´s easy to export the data and import it into R, let say in a .csv format.
As far as I have seen, due to the limited rights granted (only “Read & Analyse”) currently it´s not possible to access and extract the data via API. That would be very handy using one of the many available R packages to connect to Google Analytics.
To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: analytics for fun.
R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.