Google Analytics GA4 API Access Will Be My First Project for Pipulate
I'm excited to start my first project for Pipulate, which involves accessing the Google Analytics GA4 API. I'm taking a top-down and bottom-up approach to SEO, and I've named my repo GA4mageddon. I'm using the impending Google-induced panic about GA4 to create better examples and instructions for readers to entice them to click through to the blog post.
Exploring Google Analytics GA4 API with Pipulate: My First Project is GA4mageddon
By Michael Levin
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
The tenants of Pipulate include, you will be running a 100% genuine generic Linux server at home, first probably on your Windows laptop under WSL and not long later on something or matters not else. Linux runs on almost anything. Find something fully under your control that you can keep on 24x7 that can run Linux with a network connection. Call it a server. It matters not of its a NAS or a Raspberry Pi.
It’s weird to have the Pipulate.com domain relaunched with something a little bit interesting to look at. That logo really works. And I pulled the simple.css cdn file down local so I could edit its media queries. I wanted to keep the buttons outlined at smaller sizes.
I now have the Pipulate homepage in my list of files that I edit here in vim. The :ls command reveals I’m up to editing 15 files at once. I may cut some back, but I really like that I can do :b pip[tab] to jump to the Pipulate homepage. I renamed it’s index.md to pipulate.md so it didn’t collide with my main site homepage which I jump to with :b ind[tab]. If they collided, vim would present a menu asking which file I’d like to edit. I want this to become so part of muscle memory that the menu was annoying. I use Jekyll’s ability to set the permalink in the frontmatter to name the file pipulate.md but have it be index.html (them homepage) on the actual site. Really, it’s “/” more than index.html, but you get the idea.
Okay, now that Pipulate.com exist again, it’s time to do a top-down and bottom-up pass on the field of SEO. Top-down is surveying your sites.
Oh how SEO is different than it used to be. Once upon a time, you could (and should) look at your log files. Today, you probably only should, but because of the multitude of appealing hosting options like Github Pages, you can’t. The trade-off is worth it, darn it! That’s one of the first realities from old-school SEO that I had to adapt to. While log-files were interesting, it really is a “Google Game” for the time being, and looking at log files is less important than looking at Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
My first thoughts were to make this new repo into ga for Google Analytics, or to just spell it out as googleanalytics. But in the end I realized I wanted it to not be specific enough to exclude Google Search Console. I went through the same thought process for a GSC repo with folder-name possibilities from simply gsc to the verbose googlesearchconsole. In the end, I settled on ganalytics. I consider galytics but that’s an existing product. Ganalytics seems a pretty open word, not too much priors. But upon the thought-work that appears at the top of this article, I’ve fixed on GA4mageddon.
There is plenty of good stuff to cover in this new rendition of Pipulate and all the common stuff like crawlers and serp scrapers will come in time. But what’s really hot is GA4. There’s an impending Google-induced panic about to ripple through the world of online marketing. I can be the beneficiary of much of that because the examples out there for GA4 API access, the Python client libraries, instructions and how-to’s are really terrible right now.