127 new dimensions and metrics through the Google Analytics API

One of our aims of the Google Analytics Data Export API is to provide access to all the data you find in our reporting UI. To that end, we are releasing 127 new dimensions and metrics via the API today!

Some of the powerful new data points are:

  • Unique visitors – ga:visitors metric has been updated to support the true number of unique visitors for any date range (instead of the daily unique visitors). It also supports significantly more valid combinations.
  • Organic Searches – The number of organic searches within a session.
  • 10 new Adwords dimensions – Including Matched Query (what people searched for, not the bid term) and Placement Domain (which site you content ads were running on).
  • Search Result Views – The number of times a search result page was viewed.
  • 3 Time dimensions – To simplify plotting graphs.

We also included 111 calculated metrics to make it easy to query most common calculations in the reports, such as bounce rate, cost per conversion, and margin. Now, getting calculated metrics is both more convenient and in parity with the calculated metrics in the UI.

You can see a complete list of the new dimensions and metrics in our public changelog.

With all these dimensions and metrics, it can be time consuming to find the values you are looking for. To simplify this, we’re also launching a new interactive dimension and metric search tool. You can use this interactive tool to search for a dimension or metric using its search-as you-type feature. Even more exciting is the ability to easily determine valid dimension-metric combinations just by selecting the dimensions/metrics that you want to request. Here’s a screenshot:

We hope that you will find this new tool and additional data useful. As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback, in our developer group.

Conrad Wolfram on Teaching Maths with Computers: Dangerously Wrong

So I just watched this TED talk about teaching kids maths using computers:
He makes some excellent points in it but IMHO his argument is deeply flawed.
So who rattled the bars of your cage?: It’s a fair point, I may know about teaching geography with computers but what do I know about teaching math? Well, in my past I spent time teaching maths to geologists undergrads with low academic achievement and I’ve also been on a team that built an online set of materials teaching maths to geologists (which has now disappeared from the web).
Maths by Hand: I agree with Conrad that hand calculation of maths problems is not good training for our school students, as he points out its a relatively small, uninteresting part of a bigger question. Getting students to define a real world problem in maths terms and then understand how the numerical answer is limited is more difficult and much more important.
So what’s wrong?: The techniques that he advocates – e.g. using real world examples or verifying the answers, are aspects of constructivism which is not necessarily about using computers and has been around for years. He goes on to advocate programming as necessarily giving students a good grounding in maths, again, this approach is nothing new, logo programming was put forward as a way to teach students math techniques in the 80s. As this review reveals, the technology has a lot of merit but testing results were far from conclusive. As an example, when discussing the use of logo programming to teach geometry it says:
“In summary, studies show that success [teaching geometry with logo] requires thoughtful sequences of Logo activities and much teacher intervention. That is, Logo’s potential to develop geometric ideas will be fulfilled if teachers help shape their students’ Logo experiences and help them to think about and make connections between Logo learning and other knowledge the student might have”
(emphasis mine) Doesn’t sound a lot like Conrad’s silver bullet does it?
History of Technology and Education: The phrase ‘computers as a silver bullet’ worries me because I researched the history of Technology in Education recently. What I found is that numerous times the technology of the day has been touted as offering a paradigm shift in improving education but every time the it is later found to have over hyped. Examples in the 20th century were radio, film, TV and computers (Penrose talk prezi slides 4 to 8) all of which failed to deliver because the students’ needs were lost in the application of a a silver bullet technology. To be fair Conrad does mention that computers can deliver poor teaching but he maintains that programming is the silver bullet for math teaching.
Conclusion: Students’s educational needs are complex to meet and require experienced teachers using whatever technology is appropriate to the task at hand be that computers or a big bit of paper with some felt tip pens. Teaching technologies touted as silver bullets have always been, and will always be, a dangerous distraction.

Google Summer of Code Announced at LCA


Despite the recent devastating floods in Australia, the open source community is converging on Brisbane this week for the annual linux.conf.au (LCA). The LCA team “encourages everyone to still come to Brisbane and support local business and the community – we need your support.” Monday during the introductory session at LCA, Carol Smith, member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, proudly announced Google Summer of Code 2011.

This will be the 7th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past 6 years Google Summer of Code has had 4,500 students from over 85 countries complete the program. We are excited to announce that we will extend the scope of the program this year by targeting a 25% increase in accepted student applications as well as accepting a larger number of mentoring organizations. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.
Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2011 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!