Pulling 100,000 web visit records past the Google Analytics limit

The Google Analytics interface lets you download 5,000 web visit records at a time, and the standard API allows 10,000. Jimmy Zhong needed about a million records for Carleton College’s own analysis.

He adopted a Python script originally written by Ryan Praski and was able to download more than 100,000 records through the API. His write-up walks through the two steps for anyone repeating it: registering for the Analytics API in the Google Developers Console, including configuring the consent screen as an internal app for a Carleton account, and running the script to pull records in bulk. When the script runs, a Google login window opens to authenticate.