For many companies, Google Analytics accounts are relatively straightforward. They could have one Organization (which is optional), one account, and one property associated with that account. For every property, we recommend you set up at least three views: a “Raw Data” view, a “Test” view, and a “Master” view.
Accounts
But depending on your objectives and the complexity of your business, you may need multiple organizations, accounts, or properties, and additional views. For example, if you’re an agency managing marketing for multiple companies at once, you can set up different Organizations for each company with separate Google Analytics accounts under each Organization.
When you create an account in Google Analytics, the account is assigned a unique ID. You can see this ID in the Analytics tracking code. This is how the tracking code knows to send hit data to the correct Analytics account. You don’t need to sign in separately for multiple Analytics Organizations or Accounts. You can simply select any of the Organizations or Accounts by using the account selector. You can also select accounts that belong to your current Organization in the Admin area.
Properties
To better reflect how your business is organized, you can set up multiple properties under each Analytics account.
For example, The Google Merchandise Store may want to view data from their website and data from their mobile app in separate properties to analyze each data set independently. We recommend tracking each company’s website, mobile app, or other device in a separate property.
If you have two related websites with different URLs or subdomains that you want to track in a single property, you can set up what’s called “cross-domain tracking.” Cross-domain tracking will recognize when a user navigates between related websites in the same session. This is also known as “site linking.” To set up cross-domain tracking, you’ll need to modify the Analytics tracking code on every page of every site you want to track. Google Tag Manager can make updating that code a lot easier.
Google Analytics 360 Customers have another way to aggregate data across domains. Using a feature called “rollup reporting,” you can aggregate data automatically from multiple properties into a new combined property.
For example, if the Google Merchandise Store wanted to use one property to track their website and another property to track their mobile app, they could also create a third property to aggregate data from both the website and the app to analyze that data together. This gives Analytics 360 users options to combine the data from different properties.
Note that roll-up properties don’t include data that you import or link from another account -- like Google Ads. If you want to include linked data from your source properties into your roll-up properties, you’ll need to re-link the roll-up property with the linked account.
Also, when users are identified by the same Client ID across different source properties, session data for those users is usually merged; otherwise, that session data remains separate. For more information on roll-up reporting, please see the link at the end of this lesson.
Similar to accounts, properties also have a unique Property ID that’s appended to the Analytics ID. This tells Analytics which hits to associate with the property. You can switch properties in the Admin area by using the Property pulldown menu.
User permissions
If you use Analytics to manage multiple websites, there are a few things to keep in mind. Each Analytics account has a limited number of properties and each property has a limited number of views. Check out the documentation at the end of this lesson for limits on properties and views.
For example, let’s say you’re the administrator of a site with multiple sub-directories based on different departments in your business. You can create different views for each department using filters and then grant access to each view for the members of those departments.
To navigate to different views, in the Admin section use the View selector menu.
The Google Merchandise Store is a medium-sized ecommerce business. They use a single account, a single property, and three views for raw data, testing, and production. But you’ll need to decide how to set up your organizations, accounts, properties, and views based on the individual needs of your business.
