Before I start, I’d just like to say Hi, I’m Anna Spear (soon to be Lewis!). I work as a Search Specialist and Website Analyst at Koozai. I love spreadsheets and delving in to data, so I’ll be here as the resident Analytics bod. Any requests for future posts – let me know!
This is my first blog post here so I wanted to start at the beginning and look at how you should set up a Google Analytics for your site. Whilst targeting those just starting out, this post should also be useful for people who’ve been using Google Analytics for years as a gentle reminder of some essential things.
First things first, how many websites do you have and how many top level domains are there within this?
If you have just one domain, everything is nice and simple. When you have more than one domain you need to ensure that each top level domain has its own Account. A top level domain is the main part of any domain, for example, koozai.com and koozai.co.uk are completely separate top level domains and should each have their own Google Analytics Account but ww.koozai.com comes under the top level domain koozai.com.
Essential Tips:
– Use one Account per top level domain
– Do not use one Account for more than one domain
– Each Account can only link to one AdWords Account
– Users can have access many Accounts
– Each user can only set up 25 Accounts
– Don’t ever think that something isn’t possible in GA
Let’s get started!
If you haven’t already got a Google Account, set one up here. It’s best to use your company email rather than a GMail account.
If you’ve never logged in to Analytics before, click here to start.
When you’re logged in to Google Analytics you can start setting up your Accounts. Here’s how:
1. From the Analytics Accounts page click ‘+Add New Account’
2. Fill in all the sign up details, making sure you change Time Zone Country (UK) and Time Zone (London) depending where client website is based, these cannot be changed later:
You are then given the code to use on site, which you need to copy and add to every site of your website just before the tag. Before you add the code, make sure you’ve selected the relevant option on the left-hand side, here you can set whether the code should be for one top level domains, if you have subdomains or if you need any other customisation. But as discussed earlier, you shouldn’t need to select Multiple Top Level Domains as these should each have their own account.
You’ll notice that the code changes when you select the different options. You can get back to this page later by going to Profile Setting (click Edit alongside profile name) and clicking ‘Check Status’ in the top right-hand corner.
It’s as simple as that!
If you need to add anyone else as a user you can do this from your Accounts Overview page. We would also recommend adding a new profile for the same domain within this account so that you have a backup of raw data. Look out for my upcoming post on setting up profiles within you Google Analytics Account if you need help with this, and for other ideas of what you can do with Analytics.
Terms and Conditions to bear in mind:
Here are a few things to think about when setting up and managing Google Analytics, there’s a solution to all of them so they’re not limiting but they are important to know:
– You must not collect any user data that could identify the person – this often happens when users reset passwords and their email address becomes part of the URL
– Each account has a maximum of 5 million pageviews available if there is not an AdWords account linked.
– Google Analytics can only show you 50,000 rows of data
If you want to get more out of your Analytics, give us a call to talk about our Website Analytics Services.
For any further questions or comments please use the box below or follow me on Twitter, @Koozai_Anna
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How do one go about filter changing IP address in Google Analytics?
Thanks for such a detailed reply
Hi Steven,
There are several reasons why you should have a separate GA account for every top level domain:
1. Each Google Analytics account can only link to one AdWords Account
2. You can set the location, currency and time zone for each domain within the account, specific to that website (this is why you should keep .co.uk in a separate account from your .fr for example)
3. Each account can have multiple profiles for more in depth analysis of the domain
4. If you want someone to look at your GA account and you have other domains in there you don’t want them to see,you would have to limit their access to User rather than Administrator this would stop them from being able to create filtered profiles or help you adjust any settings to solve any problems.
5. Each user can create 25 accounts, but you can access many more than that, so you can keep the structure very organised and label each account with the correct name and not have to remember which account each website is in.
6. There is a limit of 5 million page views per account, so if you bundle websites together they are more likely to go over this.One of the biggest problems we have as an agency is accessing GA accounts for people whose web developers have set them up a GA profile within an account – the client then can’t add us as users as they don’t have admin access and we also then can’t create extra profiles or modify any settings.
For extra clarification, if you have sub domains these are best kept in the same account as they come under the same TLD.
Hopefully this has helped explain it to you but please let me know if you have any more questions.
Anna.
Hi Anna,
You say that each TLD should have it’s own GA account, but I’m not clear why. Can you clarify please?
thanks
s.Excellent guide to setting up Google Analytics Anna. One of the key things that you have pointed out is making sure that you set your time zone correctly. At present, this can not be undone and can cause real headaches if you are trying to work out the time of day that your website converts best.
Looking forward to your next post!
Welcome to the blog Anna. Sure there will be many more good posts to come.
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