Using google analytics as a generalized stats store for my web app

Question

Hi,

I'm looking at using google analytics with my web app. I have a few questions about scalability and data retrieval. I'd use it like this:

function userBuildsFarm() {
    ga.track("farm", "build", userid);
}

function userHarvestFarm() {
    qa.track("farm", "harvest", userid);
}

my questions:

1. If I have really high traffic, the amount of data being passed to google could be quite high. Are there any rate limits that would drop some of my data going through?
2. Using the above, I could store a lot of interesting stats about my app. I think I could query it when needed from my webapp. For example, a user wants to know how many times they've harvested a farm. I can probably make a request to the analytics api to fetch that information. But I think this is rate limited too.

So in general, I'm more worried about #2 - using analytics as a free statistics store, like another API for my web app. But this is probably abuse, as I could have thousands of users hitting them for these stats to render in my app.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Question 1. Yes - google does have a quota policy for the Analytics API (see section Quota Policy on on Google Analytic's Developer Guide)

As part of the TOS, Google Analytics prohibits retaining personally identifiable information (PII). It sounds like this is what you would be doing in <2>