Exploiting Google Analytics in SAS: Examples?

[HenriTheuwissen]

Hi,

We need to exploit Google Analytics data. We found several documents and blogs, but they're all quite 'old'. The SAS Support team indicated that a lot changed in the meantime and that these articles are outdated. They suggest to work with PYTHON.

Does anybody have some examples of this?

Note: the solution should run on Linux 9.3. 'Plan B'  is to run it on Windows.  

Regards,

Henri

[Rick_SAS]

You did not mention what SAS tools/products you have.  Most modern presentations that I have seen on this topic use a tool such as SAS Visual Analytics.

[HenriTheuwissen]

Hi Rick, 

We do not have Visual Analytics

We do have the 'traditional' SAS/EIP platform (with SAS/DI, IMap, Web Report Studio, OLAP Cubes etc.)  

[ChrisHemedinger]

Coming back to this because now with PROC HTTP and the JSON libname engine, it's possible to fetch Google Analytics data via Base SAS code.  This does require SAS 9.4m4.

High level steps:

1. Grant permission and obtain an authorization token for your "app" (a SAS program, in our case). This must be performed in a browser while logged into your Google account.
2. Obtain an access token and refresh token. You can accomplish this with a SAS program that you run just once. You then save the refresh token (in a safe place!) for subsequent runs.
3. Convert your saved refresh token into an access token. Do this at the start of every SAS job that needs to get Google Analytics data.
4. And finally, use the Google Analytics API to get actual data!

Details are in this blog post.