6 Remote Data Access

6.1 DataReader

Important

Go here for demos: http://pandas-datareader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/remote_data.html

Important

The sub-package pandas.io.data is removed in favor of a separately installable pandas-datareader package. This will allow the data modules to be independently updated to your pandas installation. The API for pandas-datareader v0.1.1 is the same as in pandas v0.16.1. (:issue:`8961`)

You should replace the imports of the following:

from pandas.io import data, wb

With:

from pandas_datareader import data, wb

6.2 Google Analytics

The ga module provides a wrapper for Google Analytics API to simplify retrieving traffic data. Result sets are parsed into a pandas DataFrame with a shape and data types derived from the source table.

6.2.1 Configuring Access to Google Analytics

The first thing you need to do is to setup accesses to Google Analytics API. Follow the steps below:

  1. In the Google Developers Console
    1. enable the Analytics API
    2. create a new project
    3. create a new Client ID for an “Installed Application” (in the “APIs & auth / Credentials section” of the newly created project)
    4. download it (JSON file)
  2. On your machine
    1. rename it to client_secrets.json
    2. move it to the pandas/io module directory

The first time you use the read_ga() function, a browser window will open to ask you to authentify to the Google API. Do proceed.

6.2.2 Using the Google Analytics API

The following will fetch users and pageviews (metrics) data per day of the week, for the first semester of 2014, from a particular property.

import pandas.io.ga as ga
ga.read_ga(
    account_id  = "2360420",
    profile_id  = "19462946",
    property_id = "UA-2360420-5",
    metrics     = ['users', 'pageviews'],
    dimensions  = ['dayOfWeek'],
    start_date  = "2014-01-01",
    end_date    = "2014-08-01",
    index_col   = 0,
    filters     = "pagePath=~aboutus;ga:country==France",
)

The only mandatory arguments are metrics, dimensions and start_date. We strongly recommend that you always specify the account_id, profile_id and property_id to avoid accessing the wrong data bucket in Google Analytics.

The index_col argument indicates which dimension(s) has to be taken as index.

The filters argument indicates the filtering to apply to the query. In the above example, the page URL has to contain aboutus AND the visitors country has to be France.

Detailed information in the following: