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intrasight's avatar
intrasight
Helper IV
10 years ago

Google Analytics connector missing startdate/enddate parameters

  I thought this had been asked before, but I didn't find a thread via search. A GA connection has a query pattern like so: let Source = GoogleAnalytics.Accounts(), account = Source{[Id="6...
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intrasight's avatar
intrasight
Helper IV
10 years ago

Hi,


For some reason the discussion forum won't let me respond to your most recent post, so I'm responding to this one.


By client-side, I mean that the sum is being calculated by the client - Power BI in this case - as opposed to server-side (in GA). Query folding to GA cannot work if the GA query includes the date dimension, which it still does after adding the filter. You'll see this if you look at the GA API call being made.


The correct answer from GA for my query "users last month" is 893. Power BI is reporting 1034, which is the sum of the users on each of the 31 days. "users" and perhaps half of the other metrics cannot be aggregated client-side, and so Power BI is reporting incorrect values. For query folding to work against GA, it would have to remove the date dimension from the API call - which is clearly not happening.

 

intrasight's avatar
intrasight
Helper IV
10 years ago

This post SHOULD be chronologically after the "Here's the specifics. " post. But the discussion software is buggy and won't allow a response to the last post. So I'm responding out of order. Hopefully it will sort display chronologically. 

 

I thought of a potential workaround. It sort of works but with caveats that I'll describe.  Rather than use ga:date, which doesn't fold properly, I did this:

 

let
    Source = GoogleAnalytics.Accounts(),
    GaAccount = Source{[Id="xxx"]}[Data],
    GaWebProp = GaAccount{[Id="UA-xxx-1"]}[Data],
    GaProfile = GaWebProp{[Id="13844713"]}[Data],
    GaData = Cube.Transform(GaProfile, {{Cube.AddAndExpandDimensionColumn, "ga:yearMonth", {"ga:yearMonth"}, {"Month of Year"}}, {Cube.AddMeasureColumn, "Users", "ga:users"}}),
    #"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(GaData, each ([Month of Year] = "201601")),
    #"Collapsed and Removed Columns" = Cube.CollapseAndRemoveColumns(#"Filtered Rows", {"Month of Year"})
in
    #"Collapsed and Removed Columns"

It give the corrent value users=893. But it doesn't send a start-date or end-date back to GA. Here are the GA calls:

https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/data/ga?ids=ga%3a13844713&filters=ga%3ayearMonth%3d%3d201601&metrics=ga%3ausers&start-date=2009-01-01&end-date=2016-02-05

https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/data/ga?ids=ga%3a13844713&filters=ga%3ayearMonth%3d%3d201601&metrics=ga%3ausers&dimensions=ga%3ayearMonth&start-date=2009-01-01&end-date=2016-02-05

https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/data/ga?ids=ga%3a13844713&metrics=ga%3ausers&dimensions=ga%3ayearMonth&start-date=2009-01-01&end-date=2016-02-05

So GA has to deliver data for every month since the site was created (2009). Not very smart or efficient. I want data for just one month. But at least it gives the right value.