You use Google Analytics. You may be interested in tracking traffic from specific towns. For example, given the concentration of wealth in the US, if you are a luxury retailer or a fundraiser, you may be interested in traffic from the towns with the highest income in the US. Some towns on this list have the same name as towns in other states. For example, there's "Newton, Massachusetts" and "Newton, Kansas". So, it's important to distinguish them.

Here's a wrinkle: as of June 2010, The Google Analytics "Advanced Segments" UI supports creating:

"City A OR City B OR City C", AND, "Region X OR Region Y OR Region Z"

But not

"City A AND Region X", OR, "City B AND Region Y", OR, "City C AND Region Z"

(Are we sure? we asked the experts, both publicly and privately, and they were very generous and helpful in their replies, confirming this and helping us. Special thanks go to Judah Phillips, Avinash Kaushik, Nick Mihailovski, and Justin Cutroni.)

So, we created this interface to the Google Analytics API to allow you to generate a report based on this latter query structure.

As of June 6, 2010, our interface is limited. It only supports a few, fixed metrics. It accepts only the default time period set by GA (say, one month back) for reporting. We're working on expanding these capabilities.

Also, to get this to work, we had to go beyond writing javascript talking to the GA API from your browser, to include certain code running on our server. This means you need to add "help@analyticscommons.com" as a user (with view reports only access) to the GA profile you'd like to have this query applied to. We understand this might concern you. All we can say is we promise to use this access only to make this report work for you. If you're not comfortable with this, don't use the service. We hope someday to have figured out a way to help you, and we'll report progress on this site if we do.

So, step 1: please grant "user / view reports only" access to "help@analyticscommons.com" in the appropriate GA profile.

Then, step 2: you'll be asked to upload a .csv file of region (state)-city pairs you're interested in, in the form of, say, "Illinois, Chicago"

Finally, in step 3, you'll be asked to provide a GA id for the profile we'll be applying this query to. Note: this is NOT your GA tracking code in the form "UA-XXXXXX-X". This is a number you will find in the url string when you're looking at the target profile's dashboard, in the form "&id=XXXXXX" -- we need the numbers in the place of those X's.

Then, hit submit. The query might take a bit to run, please be patient. When it's done, you'll get a web page with a table displaying the results, and we give you the option of downloading the results in .csv format.

So that's it! Please let us know what you think and what features you might like to see. Just drop us an email at help@analyticscommons.com