Last year we called on Google to let users have the option of making Google Analytics data public. Today they’ve done that, in a fashion. They aren’t aggregating the data into a public site (although adding it to Google Trends over time would make sense). But they are allowing websites to access the data via an API and publish it to the web or in applications.
Many users are clamoring for a simpler way to share their Analytics traffic data with their external stakeholders. These stakeholders, such as investors and advertisers, typically use data reported by other services to evaluate the performance of a company. Many times these estimates are significantly different than that from Google Analytics.
One way to share your Analytics data with everyone is to use our recent integration with Google Ad Planner. With this, you can replace Ad Planner traffic estimates with actual data collected by Google Analytics.
Now you can use the Google Analytics Data Export API to create your own integrations to share Google Analytics data with everyone. For example, if you use WordPress blogging software, you can display Google Analytics traffic data directly on your website using the new Analyticator plugin by Sprial Web Consulting.
Wordpress users can download a plugin here.
Transparency is good. This is going to be a popular way to share metrics with advertisers and users.
thats cool, I can see that catching on like the feedburner chicklet has
I am not sure how useful this would be , most successful blogs don’t show feedburner chicklets in plain view. e.g. Techcrunch has it in the footer
I am guessing that was necessary to save real estate
Awesome! I’m trying in my blog and the result was 0 unique visitor
How do I get more unique visitors? Showing 0 is shameful
… may be I have a better idea .. disable the plugin! 
Me too, might take time to show. Dev site also says there is an issue if you dont have Curl enabled.
Sorry if you DONT have curl enabled, they disable the counter.
Google Analyticator will only request new data every two hours. We do this because the Google Analytics API currently only support 10k requests per month. This will keep your requests far under 10k, and also allow any other potential requests from other plugins to be made without a problem.
If the problem persists, please open a support request in our Support forum.
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Jesse Altman
Spiral Web Consulting
This sounds like you didn’t add the urchin to the site, the tool makes data availble it doesn’t collect it.
Nifty.
This confirms that at least 11 people have nothing better to do with their time or were expecting some really heavy stuff on my site. I guess they didn’t get the memo.
Thats really great actually, installing to my blog.
Interesting, I’m going to install this on a few blogs and see how it works. Is it just me but has Google been rolling out a few mini updates recently?
I get that impression too Wayne.
This is so 1998. Why would any technology company or mainstream business want to show off the number visitors?
When speaking with friends who aren’t familiar with tools like Google Analytics, it frankly scares them that webmasters track visits, pageviews, bounce rates and time on site metrics.
Some things are better kept as a secret.
not true if you are looking for people to advertise on your site
If you are looking for people to advertise on your site, it helps to show a lot more than a single number.
You need to show geographics stats, demographic spread, average time spent, the price (of course) and availability.
Finally, and most importantly, if you don’t want 80-90% of them to leave straigt away, you need to get rid of that “contact form/email” and give them a self-service interface.
http://demo.trafficspaces.com illustrates what I mean.
I hope we can also display the metrics as actual HTML text like one of the options in Feedburner. Sometimes a chicklet doesn’t really fit in with a site’s design. Thanks
If you are using the plugin, Google Analyticator does indeed have a php function to get the visitor count sans widget. Furthermore, for non-WordPress sites, if you play around with Data Export API, it’s not too difficult to retrieve that data via Javascript with the libraries Google provides. The Google Analyticator plugin my company developed is just one example of what can be done with the API.
This widget is only the beginning. We made the stat widget as a request, but we plan on improving the Google Analytics integration by creating a dashboard widget to view your data via WordPress. We also have some ideas in the works that will expand on this widget to have much more functionality (dynamic charts of visitor trends, popular posts, etc).
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Jesse Altman
Spiral Web Consulting
Good job. Any plans to drop the username/password requirement in favor of Google OpenID API?
Awesome new feature! But I’m still hesitant if I’m going to show my website stats in public.
This is some great feactures that everybody wants.
sweet!
now that i’ve tried it – WOW! great job!
Uhms.. Is it so important to show how many unique visitors ya got for the public?
awesome work!!!
I check my Google adsense stats every morning to monitor the income my 100+ websites (all in the same Google account), so I could some possible uses for having API access to the data, for the purpose of creating custom reports. One thing I would like is a report showing me when Adsense income drops drastically for a site, because that way I could check it out to see if the site is down or has errors. Many times that is the first sign I have that one of my sites has a problem.
Showing stats publicly is a great feature for the fast-growing sites… but for the rest of us, it’s useless.
well said, you’ve summed it up in one line
Yess, i liked this! Finally i ll use a counter in presence..
i expected this and it happened
This is a great step forward, hopefully it may become the defacto measurement standard and make things much easier for media buyers