Wednesday, November 18, 2009

gaAddons open source project: enhancing Google Analytics

Update: gaAddons v2 is available at http://gaAddons.com
A while back I developed a script for Google Analytics and posted "Google Analytics: script to track outbound links and downloads". Those two features are not available out of the box with Google Analytics and lots of people using GA do not have the expertise nor the time to develop such automation.

gaAddons idea

The general idea of gaAddons is to develop a collection of useful enhancements and automation to extend and improve upon the default Google Analytics implementation. With the latest round of Google Analytics enhancements, especially events and custom metrics, the tool is becoming much more powerful. I already have a bunch of ideas to enhance GA, but I'll first see how the idea of gaAddons picks up.

Justin Cutroni, author of Google Analytics Short Cut and consultant at EpikOne, Brian Clifton, author of Advanced Web Analytics with Google Analytics, and John Hossack, from Vancouver-based VKI Studios have expressed interest to participate in the project. Also, thanks to Andy Edmonds and Damond Gudaitis who have already contributed to enhance the initial code.

gaAddons Open source project

gaAddons is an open source project, it's now up to GAACs, consultants and power users to contribute and collectively enhance the gaAddons features!

Source code managed through Google Code at code.google.com/p/gaddons/
Discussion forum at Google Groups: groups.google.com/group/gaaddons

I'm trowing it out there, in the wild, and we'll see if there's enough interest and collaboration to get somewhere :)