Embedded Analytics

I’ve been working on a website for somebody and they wanted to show some information about the number of visitors to the site on the site itself. Since we already had Google Analytics installed, the obvious solution was something that hooked into that. I knew there was a Google Analytics API which I could hook into, but being lazy I hoped somebody else had already implemented something for me.

Luckily for me, there is a company called Embedded Analytics that do provide this kind of service. There are various free tools available although it does cost money if you want to use it for multiple sites. But the free service was good enough for my current needs.

Setup was simple, although you do obviously need to let them have access to your Google Analytics data. If you don’t feel comfortable with that then this isn’t the service for you. If you are OK with that, then you can quickly knock together a chart showing the number of visitors or page views in the recent past. Another nice little tool is the ability to get email alerts when somebody has linked to your site.

And now I think I might want to add this to other sites, but it’s going to start costing money to use on more than one site. When my laziness is confronted by my tight fistedness, my tight fistedness always wins out. So now I have to go back to that API and figure out how to do all this and more myself.