A business (yours perhaps) gets a new website; the developers add Google Analytics. All of which sounds good, until a few months (or many months) later, when someone asks for access to the analytics.
It’s only then that you find out your company’s analytics account is set up as a Property within the developers’ Google Analytics account.
Because providing you with access to your data would let you see all the data for their other clients, your developers don’t want to give you access.
Yes, we’ve seen where this has happened. And, yes, they could create a filtered View for you that would mean you only see your data.
But it’s about then that you realise you have a bigger problem. One that’s bigger than paying them for their time to set up a custom View.
Until recently, to get control over your own data your only option was to hit the reset button. Which meant setting up a new account, updating the code on your site, and starting all over (without your historical data).
Now, Google’s changed that, making it possible to move Google Analytics properties (and their views) to other accounts. Along with that, the View settings remain intact and you get to keep all your associated links and integrations, filters, custom dashboards and reports, annotations, segments, and goals. And, because the tracking ID does not change, you don’t need to retag anything.
It’s a quick two-step process which has to be done by someone with Manage Users and Edit permissions access for both GA accounts (hopefully you are still on friendly terms with your developers).
Why should you care?
If your developers set you up with Google Analytics but under their account, and you’ve yet to do anything about that then this will be welcome news.
Of course, you may have other reasons for moving properties from one account to another (for instance, you’ve merged websites or businesses or you want a rollup of all your websites), but you haven’t done anything about it because you didn’t want the heartache of starting again from scratch. Good news for you too.
Honestly, we wonder why this wasn’t done a long time ago. But we’re pretty sure that if it was a simple fix then it would have been.
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Jeremy is a Partner and Senior Consultant at SureFire. Jeremy has been working in search since 1996, when he joined the Australian search engine, LookSmart. After relocating to San Francisco, he was instrumental in the development of the company’s paid search ad platform. At analytics company Coremetrics (now owned by IBM) he established an in-house search agency managing campaigns for Coremetrics clients such as Macy’s, Bass Pro and Lands End. At Acxiom he managed members of the pioneering SEO firm Marketleap and worked with clients such as Capital One, American General Finance and Kaiser Health. Joining SureFire in 2009, he is the head of Paid Search Advertising and oversees the delivery of AdWords and other PPC campaigns. He also helps clients make sense of their website data.
