Access Management

One very helpful feature of Google Analytics is the ability to give other people—
your IT manager or administrator, other executives, or your partner—the ability
to see and manipulate your Analytics account.

If you’ve ever worked with someone else and had them inadvertently
change something that you didn’t want changed, you may be nervous about
which privileges you grant to other users. Maybe you want them to control
everything. Maybe you only want to allow them to look at the reports. The
Access Manager lets you control who can see what and who can do what with
your whole account. You can control who has access to individual profiles
from the settings page for each profile.

The Access Manager is located near the bottom of the Analytics Settings
page. Click the Access Manager link and you’ll be taken to the Access Manager
dashboard, shown in Figure 5-8. From this dashboard you can add users and
manage those users’ privileges.

Adding a User

Recently there have been several studies about how executives want to be
involved in the collection and reporting of business intelligence, such as the
information gathered by Google Analytics. According to these reports, executives
want to be right in the middle of the action. They want access to the
reports and to receive information about what data are being gathered, how
often, and from where.

Google Analytics is built for multiple users. If you have an executive
screaming over your shoulder every day that he wants information about the
ROI (return on investment) of your web site, Analytics makes it easy to overload
him with all the information he could ever desire. All you need to do is
add your executive as a user on one or more profiles.

To add a user to your profile, go to Analytics Settings ➪ Access Manager.
In the Access Manager window is an Existing Access box that shows who your
current users are and what levels of user they are. Click + Add User in the
upper-right corner of the box to give another person privileges.

You’ll be taken to the Create New User for Access page, where you should
enter the user’s e-mail address and name, and set the access type, as shown in
Figure 5-9. If you are allowing the user viewing privileges only, you can choose
to permit access to individual profiles. If you select Account Administrator, the
user, by default, will have access to all profiles and the profile lists will disappear. When you’ve entered the relevant information, click Finish and the user
account will be created.

If you’re not sure you want the executive (or anyone else) to have complete
control over your Analytics account, you can always add them to a report
mailing list, like the one that you learned to create in Chapter 4. This is an easy
way to give your executives the information they demand without having
them poking around in areas where they could create havoc.