How to Fetch Google Analytics Statistics and Display it in Your C# Application

Google Analytics is a website statistics service offered by the internet giant Google. With the basic service being free of charge, it is definitely the most popular tool that the vast majority of webmasters rely on. It helps to gather a wide range of statistics about the visitors, social networks, search engines, or even Pay-Per-Click (PPC) networks and advertising. All these statistics are comfortably accessible using the web interface, so webmasters can easily keep an eye on them. But what if you just need to display the statistics in your own website or desktop application? In this case, the Google Analytics API (currently in version V3) is available for fetching any kind of statistics you can think of. Please note that discussing the entire API would be out of the scope of this article. I will focus solely on fetching some data (statistics) and displaying it in the form of a chart in a Windows Forms application.

Google Analytics Reporting API

The reporting API is a simple yet powerful Application Programming Interface (API) that allows developers to retrieve the Google Analytics data gathered by Google. To retrieve the statistics, some must be gathered first. Therefore, there is one important prerequisite to use the API. You need to have a Google account and a website with the tracking code. I assume you already know how to generate the JavaScript tracking code and insert it into your website. Image 1: Google Analytics tracking code Enabling the API Access There are two options for fetching the data. The first option is the Simple API access that doesn't allow accessing any private user data, so it is not sufficient for our purpose. The second approach is the Authorized API access (OAuth 2.0) which allows us to access private user data, so we will use it. In order to rely on OAuth 2.0, our application must be authenticated and the user must grant access to it. To do so, several steps must be taken. First, we need to log on to the Google Developers Console with our Google account and create a new project. Image 2: Creating Google Developers' project We will name the project “Csharpacess” and leave the auto-generated Project ID as it is. Image 3: Creating a new project Once the project is created, we are being redirected to its dashboard. Now, we need to enable the analytics API and create new access credentials. Image 4: Newly created project's dashboard After clicking on “APIs” in the left menu bar, we are being taken to the APIs list. Now we scroll down to find the Analytics API and turn it on by clicking on the “OFF” button. Image 5: Enabling the Analytics API Once turned on, we will create new credentials by clicking the “Credentials” in the menu on the left. As said above, we need to rely on OAuth if we want to access private user's data, so we will create a new ID by clicking on the “Create new Client ID” button. Image 6: Creating new access credentials Now, we need to choose between three types of Client IDs. Because we will use it in our desktop application, we will choose the “Service account” option. Image 7: Creating the Service Account client ID Once created, the browser will prompt us to save the private key to our computer. We will need the certificate for authentication, so we will save it to our computer for later use. Also, we will rename it to “Csharpaccess.p12” for easier use. Please pay attention to the auto-generated private key's password “notasecret”. We will need it in our C# application, so I encourage you to write it down or save it to some temporary file. Image 8: Downloading the certificate After the download, we are being redirected back to the dashboard with the added Service account credentials. These are now accessible anytime we need to through the Google Developers Console. However, we will need these credentials later, so we will copy them to some temporary text file for faster access. Image 9: Created Service Account credentials From now on, we have successfully created an OAuth 2.0 access. The next step is to pair it with our website through Google Analytics. Pairing with Google Analytics

The Reporting API credentials we have just created can be used to access as many websites as we need to. All we need to do is add a new user for the desired website(s) using the Google Analytics User Management. Like an email address, we need to use the email address that was generated for the OAuth 2.0 authentication in the previous step. Therefore, we will use “568017249870-9pqlki56dvp3bn64hb2pnvlnais8ndes@developer.gserviceaccount.com” in the email TextBox while leaving the default Read and Analyze permission since that is all we need in this case. Image 10: Adding new Google Analytics user From now, everything is set up, so we can start Visual Studio and create our desktop application.

Creating Simple Windows Forms Application I assume you already have some C# basics, so I will not talk about creating the form or the buttons. Instead, I will focus solely on retrieving and displaying the gathered data using the OAuth 2.0 authentication we have just created. Note: We must ensure that our Visual Studio project is set to target the .NET Framework 4.0 or .NET Framework 4.5. Adding necessary references We start by adding some required libraries' references. To install Google.Apis.Analytics.v3 Client Library, we use the popular NuGet Package Manager Console (Tools -> NuGet Package Manager). Open the console and use the following command to install the library:

Install-Package Google.Apis.Analytics.v3 Image 11: Installing Google.Apis.Analytics.v3 library with NuGet Console After the installation process is over, we can open the project's references to verify that the additional libraries were added. Image 12: New references successfully added Initializing and authenticating the service We start by declaring some variables we will need.