Today’s post is a quick tip for those of you out there using Google Analytics. I learned this lesson the hard way. Let me put it simply:
In ALL circumstances, create a new account versus a new profile. That’s right. All. I’ll explain why.
Rule #1: For now, GA profiles cannot be transferred to other accounts.
What does this mean?
I faced this problem when I transferred a couple websites to other owners. The new owners obviously needed access to the analytics. Houston, we have a problem. All my websites had been set up years ago as profiles within a single GA account. When adding a new user to either an acocunt or a profile, there are two user settings to choose from: view only or account administrator. Unfortunately, granting a user admin status on a profile gives them admin access to EVERY profile within that account. Uh-oh. That won’t work. I can’t have total strangers or even friends having unrestricted access to all my websites’ analytics.
- The way profiles were INTENDED to be
Quick Adjustments
I quickly changed both owners’ status to “view reports only” and begin to research how to transfer the existing profiles to new accounts, where the owners could become admins and not have access to any of my other analytics profiles. And that’s when I found the disturbing answer: profiles cannot be transferred to another account at this time. Seriously? Houston, we have another problem.
I’m sitting on the new owner’s historical analytics and I can’t grant them administrative access. And I can’t transfer the historical data to a new account. Bad form, Google. Bad form.
The Workaround
It was time for some creative problem solving. Essentially, I came up with one best case scenario, and one variation in case the new owner should prefer it.
Step One: I created a new account for Website X within my Google Analytics dashboard. It generated a unique GA code – i.e. a different tracking code than the one currently being used on the site.
Step Two: I imported the new code into the website, causing there to be two separate instances of GA code on the site (new and old).
Step Three: The new owner now has full admin rights to all new data effective immediately.
- This is what the accounts section looks like
Ultimately, this means the new owner has two accounts: one historical account I’m preserving on my dashboard that he has read only access to. It’s up to him whether he wishes to remove the old GA code on his site so that I can no longer see his ongoing analytics from this point forward. If he doesn’t care, he can have all data in read only format that we share access to in addition to current to future analytics data he has full administrative access to.
It’s my personal choice to allow the historical data to remain. I could have just created some spreadsheets for him, emailed them, and then deleted the profile. But if he chooses to allow the old code to remain on the site, my historical version will be the only version he can access to compare data from historical site launch to the present moment. In most business transactions, I’d imagine the owners would be a bit more possessive of their data and not wish to share or help. I have no real agenda regarding these sites anymore, so I leave the decision up to the new owners.
Two Closing Tips
A word to the wise: Create accounts, NOT profiles, when setting up Google Analytics on a NEW site. You never know when a site may be sold, traded, or donated to another down the road, and analytics information is gold. Too many companies buy and sell divisions based on productivity or economic climate. Learn from my mistake and don’t get yourself caught in a bind.
If you’ve already setup your sites as profiles under a single account, create new accounts TODAY and import the new tracking codes. You’ll thank yourself later that you were proactive as soon as possible.
A word to Google
Google Analytics, if you’re out there listening (or reading… or crawling), there needs to be a setting that does not allow a user to create a profile from a URL outside of the account domain. This simple limitation would prevent users from making the mistake I made several years ago. When you have the ability to create either a profile or an account and you don’t know the difference, there’s room for unnecessary error.
