Polaris for Google Analytics

Polaris for Google Analytics




Polaris is a cross-platform desktop widget for Google Analytics. With 8 standard reports it's the easiest way keep your data always instantly available. The rich interface and swift navigation make it a pleasure to use.

Polaris is now a free download for everyone who manages one or more website profile.

Polaris is one of the first Adobe AIR applications to be built using the recently released Google Analytics API. It’s not built by Google but there is a free single account version or a paid for multiple account option.

There as been the very successful Google Analytics Reporting suite AIR application that was built by the talented Nicholas Lierman by reverse engineering the JavaScript used by the Google Analytics website. This was due to the fact that no API was available for analytics at the time. So now the same guy is behind this product and many more to come all focused on reporting and most probably built using Flex and AIR.

So now we have an API so how does this first AIR application work out? Well not too bad at all, most of the common Google analytics functionality is here including map overlays and charts. See my video review below for a more detailed look.

Setting Up:

A one time easy setup. Choose between the free or full version, enter you Analytics account and done.



The dashboard gives you nice overview of total visits, pageviews and other useful metrics.



Switch between different date ranges with our drag and drop date widget.



The visits reports gives you a day by day view on a nice chart.



Polaris has 8 different reports.


traffic reporting



The traffic overview report shows you from which medium you get the most traffic.


Explore your traffic on the Google Maps report.


Learn which pages perform best with the top content report.


The referring sites report provides a list with the top 25 referring sites.


Design eye

Polaris has been designed as a desktop widget, so they have kept the footprint quite small. This is a nice idea but they have tried to cram a lot of functionality and data display inside and sometimes it just doesn’t work out.

The colours are striking and I’m not totally in agreement with using white on light green. I would have chosen colours with a better contrast ratio.

The graphs are nice and the animation although standard Flex is welcomed. Some graphical attention to the tool tips would have been nice as the rounded smooth finish of the UI is broken by the square harshness of the standard Flex charting tooltips.

The datagrid table for items like keywords and top content allow you to swap the column order (click and drag), although bizarrely you can’t resize the columns. This makes reading data like page titles quite difficult relying solely upon the tooltips.
Technical eye

As previously mentioned the Polaris Adobe AIR desktop application is built using the new Google Analytics API as well as Adobe AIR and Flex with charting.
In summary

Nice application with some minor UI faults. I think this will be popular with people trying out new desktop clients for Google analytics and the widget form factor might win over the punters.

I can see many AIR apps coming in future months that will create a really compelling user experience for Google Analytics so I think the best is yet to come.

System requirements:


Windows

* Intel Pentium III 1GHz or faster processor, 512MB of RAM
* Recommended: Pentium 4 2GHZ or faster, 1GB RAM
* Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise including 64 bit editions, Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2 and SP3, Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows 2000 SP4, Windows 2003 Server

Mac OS X

* Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz or faster processor; PowerPC G4 1GHz or faster processor
* Mac OS X 10.4.11 or Mac OS X 10.5.4 and 10.5.5
* 512MB of RAM

Linux

* Intel Pentium III 1GHz or faster processor, 512MB of RAM
* Recommended: Pentium 4 2GHZ or faster, 1GB RAM
* Fedora 8, Ubuntu 7.10, openSUSE 10.3



Download:






Adobe AIR Must Be Installed On Your PC

Download Adobe AIR

Download:






Enjoy !!!!!