Google Analytics (GA) is the de facto solution for analyzing web site traffic and trends. [...] If you're not regularly relying upon Google Analytics or a similarly capable analytical service, then you're left at a major competitive disadvantage in terms of your ability to effectively understand the interests, demographics, and technical requirements of your audience.

Using the Google Analytics site is a pleasant experience, but having to log in just to check your numbers each day can get tiresome quickly. Jason introduces a way, using the GAPI class to pull things like traffic statistics and account information. More examples of how it can be used are shown on the GAPI website.

Although no standard library is available from Google for PHP, some small and easy interfaces are available out there. In this post we will see how to access Google Analytics data using PHP using the GAPI library.

The GAPI library is an open sourced project that provides a direct, easy to use interface you can use to connect directly to the Analytics service without having to handle all of the manual stuff yourself. Sameer shows how to get information from the service like the top ten sources and visit counts, regional information and how to do some filtering on the results returned.