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I've been playing with Google Analytics (& tracking events) and I'd like to be able to export my data as a raw log of [session ID, tracking event/analytics statistic] so that I can do my own classification of user sessions. All I seem to be able to do is look at events in aggregate, e.g. event X happened 19 times. Does anyone know if this is possible with Google Analytics? They certainly assign a unique ID, but maybe they choose not to make it possible. If not, positive experiences with MixPanel or others?

(I've seen How do I get raw logs from Google Analytics?, but that was in 2008 before their data export API was public; I'm hoping that I'm missing something.)

Community
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sbirch
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  • For record, I've looked around more and this doesn't seem to be offered by any analytics service I could find as of Summer 2011 (Google analytics, Mixpanel, Chartbeat, too many non-event services to mention). I'm going with a custom solution. – sbirch Aug 16 '11 at 05:02
  • I have written an answer that applies to this question as well http://stackoverflow.com/a/39387049/2174074 – Michael Frost Billing Sep 14 '16 at 09:08

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Custom variables are the way to go, but still there is the limitation of 50k unique values per month.

Google Analytics uses cookies that have a session ID, so you could read the "__utmb" cookie and use that value as the session identifier.

If you plan on doing deeper identified event/usage tracking, I recommend another tool.

Sampsa Suoninen
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This is one thing that I've never liked about Google Analytics. The workaround is sort of a pain... You basically need a way to identify each unique session, and Google does not provide a way to pull those unique session IDs from their API. Thus, we are forced to create our own...

Add a javascript function that checks the value of a custom variable (one that you are using as a session variable). If the value is empty, you know it's a new session. In this case, assign an incremental value to the custom variable (probably set up an extremely basic table to find get the "next" value). This way you can export whatever data you'd like broken down by session ID.

Alec Sanger
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