For many companies, Google Analytics accounts are relatively
straightforward.
They could have one Organization (which is optional),
one account, and one property associated with that account.
For every property, we recommend you set up at least
three views: a “Raw Data” view, a “Test” view, and a “Master”
view.
But depending on your objectives and the complexity of your business,
you may need multiple organizations, accounts, or properties, and
additional views.
For example, if you’re an agency managing marketing
for multiple companies at once, you can set up different Organizations
for each company with separate Google Analytics accounts under each
Organization.
When you create an account in Google Analytics, the
account is assigned a unique ID.
You can see this ID in the Analytics tracking code.
This is how the tracking code knows to send hit data to the
correct Analytics account.
You don’t need to sign in separately for multiple Analytics
Organizations or Accounts.
You can simply select any of the Organizations or Accounts by using the account
selector.
You can also select accounts that belong to your current
Organization in the Admin area.
To better reflect how your business is organized, you can set up
multiple properties under each Analytics account.
For example, The Google Merchandise Store may want to view
data from their website and data from their mobile app in separate properties
to analyze each data set independently.
We recommend tracking each company’s website, mobile
app, or other device in a separate property.
If you have two related websites with different URLs or subdomains
that you want to track in a single property, you can set up what’s called
“cross-domain tracking.”
Cross-domain tracking will recognize when a user navigates between
related websites in the same session.
This is also known as “site linking.”
To set up cross-domain tracking, you’ll need to modify the
Analytics tracking code on every page of every site you want to track.
Google Tag Manager can make updating that code a lot easier.
Google Analytics 360 Customers have another way to
aggregate data across domains.
Using a feature called “rollup reporting,” you can aggregate
data automatically from multiple properties into a new combined
property.
For example, if the Google Merchandise Store wanted to use one
property to track their website and another property to track their
mobile app, they could also create a third property to aggregate data
from both the website and the app to analyze that data together.
This gives Analytics 360 users options to combine
the data from different properties.
Note that roll-up properties don’t include data that you
import or link from another account -- like Google AdWords.
If you want to include linked data from your source properties
into your roll-up properties, you’ll need to re-link the roll-up
property with the linked account.
Also, when users are identified by the same Client ID across
different source properties, session data for those users is usually
merged; otherwise, that session data remains separate.
For more information on roll-up reporting, please see
the link at the end of this lesson.
Similar to accounts, properties also have a unique Property ID
that’s appended to the Analytics ID.
This tells Analytics which hits to associate with the property.
You can switch properties in the Admin area by using the Property pulldown menu.
If you use Analytics to manage multiple websites, there are a few things
to keep in mind.
Each Analytics account has a limited number of
properties and each property has a limited number of views.
Check out the documentation at the end of this lesson for limits on properties and views.
Also, remember you can grant user-permissions at the account, property,
or view level.
View permissions provide access to specific data
in the Google Analytics account.
For example, let’s say you’re the administrator of a site with
multiple sub-directories based on different departments in your
business.
You can create different views for each department using
filters and then grant access to each view for the members of those
departments.
To navigate to different views, in the Admin section use
the View selector menu.
The Google Merchandise Store is a medium-sized ecommerce business.
They use a single account, a single property, and
three views for raw data, testing, and production.
But you’ll need to decide how to set up your organizations, accounts,
properties, and views based on the individual needs of your business.