Google Analytics API - Tying Behavior to Specific Dates

I am using the API to understand the performance of Adwords ad campaigns. I need to know how to attribute metrics back to the date dimension.

For instance, for a given date, if I have 20 clicks, 18 visits, and 3 goal completions, does it mean that: 1) All of these actions happened on the day in question and are otherwise independent (meaning that the 3 goals could have been for people that clicked any time in the past 30 days, not who clicked on that 开发者_运维技巧day) 2) The on-site actions are a subset of the click activity on that day (i.e. on that day, 20 people clicked, 18 registered a real visit, and 3 completed a goal)

If it is scenario 2, does that mean there is a need to refresh old rows every day?

Thanks!

It's actually none of the above - actions are sent to Google with a timestamp of when the action occurred. If the action occurs between the daterange you have specified, it will send the action to you through the API. If you are looking at visits, clicks, and goal completions, we as humans assume they are linked, because we know that we cannot have a click or a goal completion without a visit. The Analaytics system, however, doesn't make this assumption.

Let's say that you are using the "Campaign" dimension with "Visits", "Clicks", and "Goal1 Completion". If you request this information with a daterange of 7-25-2011 to 7-25-2011, you will ONLY get visits, clicks, and goal completions that were sent to google on this day. If you have a visitor that arrives just before midnight and makes clicks both before and after midnight in the same session, their clicks will be split between the two days.

Now if you want to break it down by hour instead (using the "Hour" dimension), you will see all of those clicks/visits broken up by the hour which they were sent. The combined values of the metrics should equal the metrics for the day.

In short, you're requesting all visits and all clicks and all goal completions rather than all clicks and goal completions by visit.