Envato Analytics upgrade - What would you like?

Thanks for the feedback!

Some of you may already know that I maintain the Envato Analytics (EA) website for Envato, but you may not know that I work for Envato as an external contractor. The upside is that my contribution does not impact the development projects that Envato itself is working on and we are all eagerly waiting for. The downside is that I have to work with resources that are generally available.

I have gone through your suggestions and grouped them into those which require changes to Envato API , i.e. exposing extra data and those which I can address without Envato developer involvement. Obviously, my immediate plan is to focus on the data that is generally available, specifically via Google Analytics. Then over time, as the Envato API matures, to deliver some of your other requests. I hope that works for all of you.

This nicely brings me to my next point re Google Analytics. When EA was first started in 2010, Google Analytics API limited client applications to 10,000 API calls per day. As you know Envato has tens of thousands of authors and well over 1M items across all marketplaces. While not all authors check every one of their items on the daily basis, it’s easy to imagine how quickly the APIs could be used up! So currently we ration the API calls. Fortunately, Google recently increased the API quota from 10,000 to 50,000 API calls per day per project, which puts us in a position to tackle some of the suggested features from this thread.

The next thing is the issue of speed, which has been raised a number of times. I am going to experiment a little bit to see if anything can be done to improve response times. I do not want to raise expectations for significant improvements as there is one thing that we can’t change and that is the speed with which Google Analytics responds to our queries. Accessing the data through the Google APIs is the slowest component of our application. How slow you might ask? Let’s just say because Envato accumulates such large amounts of traffic data sometimes it takes a long time to view a report even on Google’s own analytics website. This is really unfortunate and naturally forces us to favour faster reporting options over slower ones. For example, there are a number of requests to merge the three views provided onto one page. Well that is very easy to do, but currently each view takes an API call, so imagine taking 3 times longer so that it can all be on one page! Furthermore, merging three views into one view consumes 3 API calls, when the author may not be interested in all of the views.

Having said all of the above I am working through your suggestions and over the next few months will be releasing incremental improvements.

I want to thank everyone for adding their views to this discussion, which has been really insightful, and if other thoughts come to mind, please post away!

@DenonStudio

Do you think the conversion feature is something that could be done currently?

If its not to late… I would like to add the ability to view stats for more than one item at a time would help a huge amount. I might actually use it then.

butlerm said
If its not to late… I would like to add the ability to view stats for more than one item at a time would help a huge amount. I might actually use it then.

Yh, that would be nice, like overlay the results with different colours.

aaranmcguire said
@DenonStudio Do you think the conversion feature is something that could be done currently?

it’s already possible, install the Statementer http://notes.envato.com/authors/understand-your-sales-stats-with-the-statementer/

Oh ya and a remember feature would be nice… I think this one was requested a year ago so you don’t have to go and get your API key every time you log on.

dtbaker said
wonder if Envato devs will be doing these analytics upgrades or the freelancer who originally created it ?

thanks for clearing that up @DenonStudio !