number differences from google analytics api vs. analytics.google.com

Question

I'm getting data from the analytics api and matching it up with what is available with a browser at analytics.google.com

The numbers are slightly off. For example, from 5/1 to 5/26 the organic search number in the api is 167. In analytics.google.com from 5/1 to 5/25 the reported number is 170 (from 5/1 to 5/26 it is 175). We are finding similarly slightly inconsistent differences for other account metrics. All are a little different, generally less than from the what the browser interface shows.

Here is my actual code to pull the metrics with the api

function getResults(&$analytics, $profileId, $param, $start, $end) {
// Calls the Core Reporting API 
 return $analytics->data_ga->get(
     'ga:' . $profileId,
     $start,
     $end,
     'ga:' . $param
      );
}

Why is this data reporting difference happening? Is it something about the way the API recognizes a date like "2016-05-01"? What can I do to the API requests to get matching data?

Answer 1

The way I am able to solve this issue is to not use the metric ga:organicSearches (For whatever reason this number is different than the organic number in the analytics browser view.)

and instead access the organic metric via the ga:medium

$optParams = array(
          'dimensions' => 'ga:medium',
          'filters' => 'ga:medium==organic');

        $results = $analytics->data_ga->get(
          'ga:'.$viewid,
          $start,
          $end,
          'ga:sessions',
          $optParams);

        return $results;