Frequently Asked Questions

WHAT DOES “SCITYLANA” STAND FOR?

“SCITYLANA” is “ANALYTICS” spelled backward! It is pronounced /ˈsɪtilaːnə/, but you can just call it “City Lana.” ☺

WHAT IS SCITYLANA?

SCITYLANA allows you to extract data in its raw form from Google Analytics and store it in either BigQuery, Azure or S3. By “raw” we mean non-sampled data

stored at the highest level of granularity – registering each individual click.

HOW DOES SCITYLANA WORK?

SCITYLANA’s cloud native solution uses Google’s API to extract your Google Analytics as hit-level.

Can SCITYLANA extract clientID?

By default, the Google Analytics only provides summarized data with no access to the clickstreams of individual visitors, limiting your access to information. However, by using the Google Analytics API, SCITYLANA is able to load the original IDs for each visitor and store them in a custom dimension in Google Analytics. These IDs enable SCITYLANA to reconstruct the raw, click-level data by stitching together multiple filtered queries.

HOW DO YOU GET CLICK-LEVEL DATA FROM GOOGLE ANALYTICS? DO I NEED GOOGLE ANALYTICS 360?

No, there is no need for a GA Premium account. SCITYLANA uniquely extracts data from the Google Analytics Core Reporting API. Rather than returning one large data table, it tracks unique user IDs and uses a series of queries to poolstitch together multiple smaller tables, each of which respects Google’s API limits and quotas. From these smaller tables, SCITYLANA identifies the clickstreams of individual visits and visitors.

WHERE ARE MY GOOGLE ANALYTICS DATA STORED?

The data can be stored in either BigQuery, S3 or Azure.

The Power BI template file you receive as part of the installation comes with a data connection to the specified folder and text files. When you refresh the connection, data will load from the folder into a pre-configured report in the Power BI file.

CAN I SHARE DATA EXTRACTED BY SCITYLANA?

Yes. By default, SCITYLANA stores your data in cloud services, ensuring maximum accessibility.

WHAT IS HIT-LEVEL DATA?

Hit-level data is web analytics data in a raw, unsampled form stored with the highest degree of detail so that you can summarize or aggregate the data on the fly in virtually any way you want. With click-level data, you can create custom metrics, cross-tabulate data, and use filters in unlimited ways. You can also zoom in on the actions of individual visits or visitors and integrate web and customer data if you pass along (anonymous) customer IDs to GA.

WHAT IS UNSAMPLED DATA?

Google Analytics reports are sometimes based on sampled data because this is faster than processing a complete data set. “Unsampled data” is Google’s term for the complete data set. With SCITYLANA you go beyond the summarized reports and extract hit-level data from GA.

HOW ARE YOU DIFFERENT FROM THE READYMADE GOOGLE ANALYTICS CONNECTIONS IN BI TOOLS?

While you can easily pull Google Analytics data into business intelligence tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Targit and QlikView, these tools only provide aggregated (and sometimes sampled) Google Analytics data. They also only allow 7 dimensions and 10 metrics in each query. In contrast, SCITYLANA extracts every single click made by your visitors and loads these into Power BI as a complete data model. This allows you to integrate data at the highest level of granularity so that you can see the behavioral profiles of individual customers. It also enables you to integrate data at the deepest possible level and removes virtually all the analytical constraints that you may experience in the web-interface of GA.

WHICH TYPE OF DATA CAN I INTEGRATE WITH MY GA DATA?

You can integrate any type of data if it shares a key (a column) with one of the tables in your GA data model. The most interesting data to integrate is probably customer and product data. Examples of primary keys that may be used for integration are customers IDs and product SKUs. You can also use a date or a timestamp as a primary key if, for example, you want to add information about the weather or specific events to your data model.

DOES OUR APP ONLY WORKS WITH WINDOWS?

No, Windows is not a requirement.