Now that you know how data gets collected, let’s look at how Google
Analytics accounts are organized.
All of your Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under an “Organization,”
which is optional.
This allows you to manage multiple Google Analytics accounts
under one grouping.
Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts, while, medium
to small-sized businesses generally (only) use one account.
When you create an account, you also automatically
create a property and, within that property, a view for that account.
But each Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property
can have multiple views.
This lets you organize your Analytics data collection
in a way that best reflects your business.
The Google Analytics Account determines how data
is collected from your websites and manages who can access that data.
Typically, you would create separate Analytics accounts for distinct
businesses or business units.
Each Google Analytics account has at least one “property.”
Each property can collect data independently of each
other using a unique tracking ID that appears in your tracking code.
You may assign multiple properties to each account,
so you can collect data from different websites, mobile applications,
or other digital assets associated with your business.
For example, you may want to have separate properties for different sales regions
or different brands.
This allows you to easily view the data for an individual part of your
business, but keep in mind this won’t allow you to see data from
separate properties in aggregate.
Just as each account can have multiple “properties,” each property can have multiple
“views.”
You can use a feature called Filters in your configuration
settings to determine what data you want to include in the reports for
each view.
For example, The Google Store sells merchandise from their
website across different geographical regions.
They could create one view that includes all of
their global website data.
But if they wanted to see data for individual regions, they could create separate views
for North America, Europe, and Asia.
If the Google Store wanted to only see data for external traffic
(that didn’t include their own store employees), they could set up a
view that filtered out internal traffic based on IP address.
The view level also lets you set Google Analytics “Goals”.
Goals are a valuable way to track conversions, or business objectives,
from your website.
A goal could be how many users signed up for
an email newsletter, or how many users purchased a product.
We’ll discuss Goals and Conversions in a later lesson.
Be thoughtful when setting up your accounts, properties,
and views, because you can’t change data once it’s been collected and
processed.
by Google Analytics.
Before we move on to user access permissions, there are a couple important
things to note about views.
New views only include data from the date the view was created and
onwards.
When you create a new view, it will not include past data.
If you delete a view, only administrators can
recover that view within a limited amount of time.
Otherwise, the view will be permanently deleted.
You can assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or
view level.
Each level inherits permissions from the level above it.
For example, if you have access to an account,
then you have the same access permissions to the properties and views underneath
that account.
But if you only have access permissions for a view,
then you won’t have permission to modify the property or account
associated with that view.
By clicking “Admin”, Google Analytics lets you set user permissions for:
“managing users,” “edit,” “collaborate,” or “read and analyze.”
“Managing users” lets users add or remove user access to the account,
property, or view.
“Edit” lets users make changes to the configuration
settings.
“Collaborate” allows users to share things like dashboards or
certain measurement settings.
And finally, “Read and Analyze” lets users view data, analyze reports, and create dashboards,
but restricts them from making changes to the settings or adding
new users.
How you configure your organizations, accounts, properties,
and views can affect how your data gets collected.
Be thoughtful when setting up your Google Analytics implementation, and make sure you
align your properties and views of the data you collect with your overall
business structure.