Account and User Management in Google Analytics

                     

Now that we have understood a little bit about how visits are calculated and how google analytics gathers information, let’s move further with understanding the account structure and views in Google Analytics.

In the above screenshot you can see how Account, Property and Views are linked.

A Single Account can have multiple properties and every property can have multiple views. Now let's understand a few things about Account, Property and Views.

Account: This account is the google analytics account which gets linked to your google account once it's created.You can create up to 25 Google Analytics accounts using a single google account.

Property: Property is basically the website which we are tracking. Using a single Google analytics account you can track multiple websites. Every property has a unique tracking code which we use to track the website. It starts with UA-*******. We had set up the tracking code when we were setting up google analytics for our website. http://understandingbi.blogspot.com/2014/02/setting-up-google-analytics-account-for.html

View: View is the actual information we want to see, analyze and provide to the people.We can create multiple views for a single property.We can create subsets of all the data we have, filter out unwanted data in a view. It is recommended that we create at least 3 views per property i.e. One Unfiltered View which usually gets created whenever we set up a google anayltics account and add a property. Apart from that we should have a Master view which will be our final report wherein we have removed all the unwanted data and lastly one test View. Test view will be used to test the changes we will be applying to our master view.

In the above screenshot you can see that I have a Account named Rohan_Patil_MIS6344 , a property named Understanding Business Intelligence and I have in all five views attached to the property. Also, you will notice that the data count in All Web Site Data view is much higher than any other views because I created the other views after a few days. So all the prior data is lost.Also in case we accidentally delete any view, it cannot be restored and the data is lost for ever. So we have to be cautious while deleting any view. 

Since we always need to display the report and analysis to many people we can also allow people to view the data in their account giving specific user permissions.

Lets understand a few things about User Management in Google Analytics.

There are basically Four types of User permissions in Google Analytics:

1.) Read & Analyze : This permission allows users to view data and configuration settings. They can also segment data, create personal assets and share them and also view shared assets, but they cannot collaborate them with the shared assets.

2.) Collaborate: This permission allows a user to collaborate the shared assets apart from able to create personal assets and sharing them.Collaborate permission included Read & Analyze permission.

3.) Manage: This permission allows the user to add or delete the user and also give permissions to the user. But it cannot perform collaborate or Edit operations.

4.) Edit: This permission allows users to perform administrative activities like add/deleting accounts,properties or views. Apart from that they can remove/add filters, goals, segments and also view all the available data.Collaborate permission comes in line with Edit permission.Only Edit permission does not allow to add/remove users i.e. it does not allow to manage users.

 Here in the above screenshot user rohanapatil88@gmail.com has all the permissions, rohanpatilblog@gmail.com has Collaborate and Read & Analyze permission and harpreetmann21@gmail.com has Read & Analyze permission. You can provide permissions at Account level, Property Level and View level. But Parent permissions are inherited by default to child.For e.g. a user has manage permission at account level, it will be inherited to all the properties and views associated with the account. You can add more permissions at child level, but you cannot remove the inherited properties from the parent.

Here if you observe permissions provided to rohanpatilblog@gmail.com, they are collaborate and Read & Analyze at property level.

Now at View Level, I can only add permissions to the user, but I cannot remove the permissions inherited from property level.

Also, you can provide permissions to different users by entering their email ids in Add permission block.

References :

User permissions. (n.p., n.p. n.p.). Retrieved from support.google.com: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2884495?hl=en