How can I report custom events by visitor in Google Analytics

Question

We use custom event tracking in our web application with Google Analytics to report user's behavior (for example - user clicks on key actions, client side errors, time measurements, etc.) Each time the Google Analytics code is run on the client, we set a custom variable at the Visitor session to set the actual username of the user. How do you use Google Analytics to report a table of all the custom events by visitor? Our goal is to be able to have a storyline for each user, with all the events produced by the application correlated to its username.

Answer 1

There are no views in Google Analytics that will give you this full view (basically, querying a JOIN of events and custom variables) by default. There are, however, 2 ways that I know of to access this data.

Worse, less technical solution: Advanced Segmentation: On a user-by-user basis, you could view a segment where the custom variable value is equal to a particular username to see their actions on the site. This is not particularly scalable, particularly because it is work intensive and Google Analytics limits you to 100 custom variables.

Better, harder solution: API Call: You could access these values in an API call, and parse what it returns yourself.

Depending on your exact needs, the API call would be structured something like:

Metrics: ga:visits

Dimensions: ga:customVarValue1,ga:customVarName1,ga:eventCategory,ga:eventAction,ga:eventLabel

You can test out this query using the Google Analytics Data Export API Query Explorer here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataExplorer.html?dimensions=ga%253AcustomVarValue1%252Cga%253AcustomVarName1%252Cga%253AeventCategory%252Cga%253AeventAction%252Cga%253AeventLabel&metrics=ga%253Avisits&start-date=2010-02-03&end-date=2010-10-26&max-results=50