[GA4] Google Analytics account structure

See examples of Google Analytics account and property setups and learn the principles for organizing your account and properties

In Google Analytics 4, there are no views and you can perform separate collections of data. The granularity to which you separate your data and how you control access to it depends upon (1) your needs and (2) whether you use standard Google Analytics or Google Analytics 360.

This article is meant for structuring large business accounts. If you manage an account for a small or midsize business, you may not need to consider your account structure.

Example Google Analytics account setups

Extended guide and reference

The remainder of this guide provides detailed information for businesses whose needs extend beyond the examples in the section above. This extended guide is particularly relevant if you are a Google Analytics 360 customer.

Concepts and definitions

If you’re learning about Google Analytics 4 properties, you may find these articles and videos helpful:

  • Account: A collection of properties whose data is owned by a single legal entity and governed by region-specific terms of service (TOS).
    Is it important that the data from each region is owned by a distinct legal entity within that region?
    • Yes: Create multiple accounts, one for each region.
    • No: Create one account in the region that houses your company headquarters.
  • Property: Lives within an account, and represents data for one user base. If data should generally be analyzed together (product line, brand, application), data should be in one property (which can act as a source property if you have Google Analytics 360.)
    Is the data you collect related to a single logical user base? When you link Analytics to other products, do you want to share that entire body of data with each product?
    • Yes: Create one property.
    • No: Create a separate property or subproperty for each logical user base.
  • Data stream: Lives within a property, and is the source of data from an app or website. The best practice is to use a maximum of 3 data streams per property: 1 single web data stream to measure the web user journey and 1 app data stream each for iOS and Android.
    • App data stream: You can have one data stream for each combination of app-package name and platform.
    • Web data stream: In most cases, you should use a single web data stream to measure the web user journey. To ensure consistent user and session reporting for web journeys that span domains, use a single web data stream combined with cross domain measurement.

Best practices

The following best practices and recommendations are meant to cover a wide range of users and use cases. There may be edge cases where this guidance does not apply or needs to be adapted to specific circumstances.

In general, you should set up one account per company and one property per brand or business unit (assuming your brands and business units are unique/distinct operating entities with separate stakeholders/analyst groups).

Example A

  • Parent Company A: 1 account
    • Brand X (automotive): 1 property
    • Brand Y (household goods): 1 property
    • Brand Z (consumer electronics): 1 property

In this case, the parent company has one account and three distinct properties, with each property containing data related only to that brand/business.

Example B

  • Enterprise company B: 1 account
    • Product line D (home insurance): 1 property
    • Product line E (car insurance): same property as D
    • Product line F (life insurance): same property as D & E

In this case, the enterprise has chosen to have all lines of business send their data into a single property. They may have customers that regularly use multiple products, or often use upsell or cross-sell campaigns between products, so it makes sense to see all of that data together. This property can act as a source property to subproperties for individual product line analysis (see below).

Example C

  • Small business C (ex. Joe’s deli): 1 account
    • All products (deli meats, sandwiches, beverages, etc): 1 property

In this example, Joe's deli is a small business and doesn't need multiple properties. They analyze all of their data together for their online deli delivery business, since customers often buy more than one product and Joe's deli doesn't have different lines of business. A single property for all of their data makes sense.

Data streams

Each source property has streams of data from an app and/or website providing incoming data. A data stream is therefore simply a website or app sending data to a specific GA4 property.

We recommend:

  • 1 web data stream per property
  • 1 iOS data stream per property
  • 1 Android data stream per property
Each app data stream can only be linked to one GA4 property, so consider this as you decide which streams to link to a property.

Search Console integration

You can link a GA4 property to Search Console. This brings rich new data into Google Analytics, such as Search Queries from Organic Google Search, and dimensions for reporting, such as Landing Page.

You need to decide which property should be linked to which Search Console property. If you are using subproperties and roll-up properties, you'll need to choose whether to link to the source property, subproperty, or roll-up property.

Setting up the link between your GA4 property and your Search Console property is a quick and straightforward process that can be done in the GA4 Admin page. Note that you will need to be a verified site administrator on the Search Console property and have the Administrator role on the Google Analytics 4 property to set up the link.

Customize what reports are visible

Google Analytics 4 properties give you full control over what reports to show, the metrics and dimensions included in those reports, and the graphs within your reports. You can set up an entire report collection that is relevant to just a certain group, for example, the Marketing team (but note, you cannot restrict access to these collections; all property users will be able to see them). This allows you to customize GA4 so that the most relevant reports are the first that you see or the easiest to access, without having to wade through reports that you may not need.

Example of Marketing Team report collection:

Example marketing team report collection

You can customize the specific reports within each collection. For example, most table reports have a “Total Revenue” metric that shows up in the standard report configuration. This is great if you are an ecommerce business sending revenue data and you want your teams to be able to analyze this. However if you do not have revenue data to report within Google Analytics, this column will show a $0.00 value for every row. If it’s not a relevant metric for your business, you can remove it and declutter your reports.

Events report with Total Revenue metric:

Events report with Total Revenue metric

Edit interface (click the “X” next to the metric to remove):

Event edit interface - click X next to the metric to remove

Apply and save without “Total Revenue” metric:

Event saved without "Total Revenue" metric

This report is now much cleaner for a business that does not have (or does not want to show) revenue data within Google Analytics.

Data-hygiene best practices

In addition to filtering your reports to include or exclude certain data, pay close attention to data hygiene, which includes excluding internal IP traffic, excluding unwanted referrals, and ensuring cross-domain measurement is properly set up.

Exclude internal IP traffic

Removing internal IP traffic from your data sets can be an important set up step for many businesses who see a lot of employee traffic on their website, for example, a support technician who often references help center articles from their companies website while working with a customer. This ensures that your company employees (internal users) are not skewing your analytics data meant to report on external customer use cases. This is now a preset filter in GA4:

Create external traffic rule interface

Remove unwanted referrals

Another aspect of data-hygiene best practices to consider is excluding unwanted referral traffic. This allows you to keep data from certain referral sources out of your production data by keeping the event, but ignoring the referrer so the traffic attribution is unaffected. Again, this is now a predefined configuration in GA4:

List unwanted referrals interface

Set up cross-domain measurement

Lastly, a common issue for Google Analytics users has always been dealing with cross-domain traffic. Previously, you would have to set up cross-domain measurement either through Google Tag Manager or your TMS, or by hard coding it on your site. This required extra effort that was not always achievable for Google Analytics users, and thus often led to data hygiene issues showing new or inflated session count and referrals from your own owned domains. Google Analytics 4 makes this easy to set up within the user interface to help improve your data hygiene:

Configure your domains interface

Data transformations

Data transformations can be handled through event creation and modification in Google Analytics 4 properties.

For example, let’s say that you discover that a certain event has been sent to your GA4 property twice, but in two different ways. Maybe the “start_now” event that leads to a key action on your website is being sent to GA4 in multiple ways (“start_now” and “startNow”) because it appears in several different places on your website that were developed by different teams that unknowingly coded things differently. This is a common scenario that can impact your data quality, however you can now correct this by creating and modifying events in the user interface.

Event interface

To fix this issue, click Modify event in the Configure section of your GA4 property.

Modify event button in Configure section

You’ll get to this screen where you can specify the changes you want to make. In this case, you’ll choose which Start Now event you want to keep, and choose to modify the other to match it. The example below shows that any event with the name “startNow” will be modified to instead have the event name of “start_now”. This will consolidate these two event names into a single name going forward; your reports will look much cleaner with a single row for this event.

Modify event interface

User permissions and user roles

Google Analytics 4 properties introduce streamlined and smarter roles and restrictions functionality. Standard roles now include the following:

  • Administrator: someone with full control of the account
  • Editor: someone who has full edit access to data and settings but cannot manage users
  • Analyst: someone who can create and edit shared assets in addition to viewing data and configurations
  • Viewer: someone who can see report data and configuration settings

Additionally, GA4 properties add the ability to hide cost and revenue data within the reporting interface based on an assigned data restriction role of “No Cost Metrics” or “No Revenue Metrics”. This is a useful addition to user permissions to help protect sensitive business data while allowing access to site and behavioral data to certain audiences.

Note about cost and revenue restrictions: Metric filters will not work on an audience that shows revenue data. Additionally, users with these restrictions will still be able to see purchase event counts. So, if you are concerned about seeing event counts for purchase data, you will need to consider a subproperty for this use case.

Direct roles and data restrictions interface

360-specific features: subproperties and roll-up properties

Examples with subproperties and roll-up properties

If we revisit some of our examples from the beginning of this guide, we can see how these scenarios look from a set-up perspective.

Linking: Google Ads, SA360, and DV360

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