Google Data

Today we are releasing two new versions of our Management API into public beta; a brand new version 3.0 and a backwards compatible version 2.4. While the data the API exposes is the same, both versions migrate the Management API from the existing Google Data Protocol to Google’s new API infrastructure. This impacts the way you request and handle data from the API.

With this change, we are also announcing the deprecation of the legacy version 2.3 of the Management API. It will continue to work for 2 months, after which all v2.3 requests will return a v2.4 response.

The biggest changes in switching to the new versions are that developers need to register their applications via the Google APIs Console and use a developer token. Also the URL endpoints have changed, which influence how you request OAuth authorization tokens.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new:

Version 3.0
Is the latest major version of our API and is not backwards compatible. Features include:

• A faster response over version 2.3
• An improved quota policy
• Integration with the Google APIs console to manage API access and request more quota
• OAuth 2.0 is now the recommended way to Authorize users
• The URL to make requests is now at https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/management/...
• The API response is more compact using JSON
• New Google API client libraries, which support many more languages
• Support for the Google Discovery API

All future development of the API will be done to this version so we also added some exciting new data only in version 3, including:

• Event goals are fully represented
• An internal web property id which can be used to deep link into the GA user interface
• Profile configurations for the default page and site search query parameters

Version 2.4
This is a minor version upgrade and we tried hard to make it backwards compatible with the existing Version 2.3. New changes include:

• A faster response over version 2.3
• An improved quota policy
• Integration with the Google API console to manage API access and request more quota
• Continued support for existing authorization mechanisms; OAuth 2.0 now supported
• The URL to make requests is now at https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v2.4/management/...
• Supports XML response only
• The Google Data JavaScript client library will not work with this version

The XML output from this version is the same as version 2.3 so the existing Google Data client libraries will continue to work.

If You’re a Developer, What You Need To Do
Take a deep breath and get excited ;)

While we typically don’t share our roadmap, to alleviate any concerns, we wanted to give you some insight on where we’re going and how this release fits into the bigger picture. Today’s release adds two new versions to the Management API, v2.4 and v3.0. We also have a Data Export API that provides access to report data, which is still on version 2.3. In the future, we plan to do a similar upgrade to the Data Export API Data Feed by releasing two new versions for it, and deprecating version 2.3. At that time, we also plan to completely deprecate the Data Export API Account Feed.

The future of our APIs is to access all configuration data through the Management API and all processed report data through the Data Export API.

So for now, if you are already using the Management API, we recommend you migrate to the latest and greatest version 3.0.

If you are still using the Account Feed in the Data Export API, we highly recommend you test out the new Management API and start planning your migration. But, you can probably wait to do a full migration until all our APIs are on version 3.0.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out in our Management API developer group.


Posted by Jeetendra Soneja and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team