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.

Website Profiles

How many web sites do you own? Do you have just one or do you collect them
the way Monopoly players hoard hotels? Maybe you’ve got a web site and a
separate blog or a personal site and an e-commerce one? If you have multiple
sites to track, you know it can be a hassle if you have to track all those sites separately. It takes time to keep up with each site, and it’s always hard to come up
with extra time.

Google Analytics makes it easy for you to track the analytics and metrics for
multiple sites or even subdomains by creating profiles that you can manage
from one location. Below the Analytics Settings ribbon is a Website Profiles
table. This table contains all the links you need to administer your various profiles,
to add a profile, or to change or delete a profile. There’s also a status category
that gives you a quick look at the tracking status of each profile you’ve
created. If for some reason your tracking code isn’t working properly, you’ll be
able to see that very quickly in the Status column of this table.


Adding a Profile

When you sign into Google Analytics for the first time, you’ll be directed to a
web site where you set up your first profile (you may remember doing this
back in Chapter 4). Once you get that first profile set up, you can add additional
profiles through the Website Profiles dialog box.
Here’s how to add a new profile to those you’re tracking:

1. In the Website Profiles table on the Analytics Settings dashboard, click
Add Website Profile.

2. As Figure 5-4 shows, the information page for the new web site profile
appears. Select from the options to add a new domain to track or to add
an existing domain to track. The new domain is for a site that you are
not currently tracking. The existing domain would be a portion, or page,
of a site you’re already tracking that you would like to track separately.
(The way time-zone information is presented may differ slightly among
users.)

3. After you select the Profile Type, select whether your site is an HTTP
site or an HTTPS site (HTTPS is usually used for secured pages, like
checkouts or registration pages). Then enter the URL of the web site
that you want to track in the Add a Profile for a New Domain text box.

4. If you’re adding a page to an existing profile, then click Add a profile
for an existing domain, select the Domain Name you want to add the
profile to, and give the profile a name.



5. Click Finish.

6. You’ll be taken to the Tracking Status screen, as shown in Figure 5-5.
The code that makes it possible for Google to track your site is located
below the Instructions for Adding Tracking. Copy that code and paste
it to the bottom of your Web page before the tag, and the site
will be added to your profiles for tracking.

Checking Status

Once you’ve added the code to your web site, it will appear in the Status category
on your Analytics Settings dashboard as pending. You should see the status
of the tracking on your site whether it is Pending or Receiving Data.
Pending means that Analytics is still gathering information.

It could take a couple of days for Analytics to gather enough information to
begin producing reports. When enough tracking information has been gathered,
the message Receiving Data will be displayed in the Status category.

Editing a Profile

Once you’ve created your Analytics profiles, you can edit or change the profile
information by clicking the Edit command that’s on the same row as the profile
name in the Website Profiles table. The profile name is usually the URL of
the web site you’re tracking, though it might be something like “Web Store” if
you’re tracking the part of your web site where e-commerce takes place.
The profile settings page is shown in Figure 5-6.

This page enables you to change four types of profile setting

■■ Main Website Profile Information: Change the profile name or the
URL of the site you’re tracking, or set a default page —the index page
of the site you’re tracking. Add query parameters, set your time zone
and currency settings, or choose which reports you would like to have
access to.

■■ Conversion Goals and Funnel: A conversion goal is a target page you
want users to reach. For example, if you want to drive traffic to sign up
for your corporate newsletter, your conversion goal would be the “thank you”
page for the sign-up process. The number of people who actually
reach the “thank-you” page is then counted toward the conversion goal.
Funnels are pages that you expect your visitors to pass through to reach
your conversion goal. You can specify up to 10 pages as funnel pages.
Those pages are then monitored to show traffic patterns and how users
navigate through your site to your conversion goal—and where people
drop out of the process that leads them to a goal. You’ll learn more about
creating and tracking goals and funnels in chapter 7.

■■ Filters Applied to Profile: Filters help you achieve more accurate measurements
of the traffic on your site. For example, you can choose to filter
visitors who enter your site from a specific domain as a way to ensure
more accurate reports. The most common use of this feature would be to
filter out traffic from your IP address. Say that your browser loads your web site’s home page when you open a new window. You don’t want to skew data about real visitors by counting hundreds — if not thousands — of your own visits and page loads. A filter can tell Google Analytics to ignore anything that comes from your IP address, resulting in more accurate metrics. Filters can be quite complicated, especially when you begin to create advanced filters with Regular Expressions, so
you’ll find more information on this topic in Chapter 6.

■■ Users with Access to Profile: In many organizations, more than one person
will want or need to have access to the information that Analytics
collects and the reports that it returns. There are two levels of access:
View Reports and Account Administrator. View Reports allows the user
to look at any reports in that profile. Administrator privileges allow the
user to make changes to View Reports and make changes to settings.
This is where you add users for individual profiles, instead of adding
them to the whole account.

All these settings can be changed at any time. If you try something and it
doesn’t work, you can change it again until it does work. Each web site you’re
tracking has its own profile settings, so you can manage each profile in a way
that works best for that profile.

Deleting a Profile

Change happens, and it’s a good bet that your needs will change over time.
You may change the name of your web site, add profiles you want to track, or
delete profiles. To delete a profile, navigate to the Analytics Settings page; then
find the name of the profile that you want to delete. Click the Delete link that’s
in the same row as the name of the profile. As Figure 5-7 shows, you’ll be
prompted to confirm that you want to delete the profile. Click OK and the profile
will be deleted.
Make sure you really want to delete the profile from Analytics before you
click OK. Once you confirm, there’s no way to get the profile back. If you
change your mind, you’ll have to recreate the profile from the beginning and
you’ll lose all your historical data

The Settings Dashboard

It’s one thing to collect data. Any web statistics program will do that. But to go
beyond gathering data to producing usable information —that’s something
completely different. While most analytics programs produce almost any kind
of data your heart could desire, they don’t make it easy to use. And if you can’t
figure out what the data mean, you can’t use that data to your benefit.

To produce meaningful data, even with the easiest of analytics programs,
you have to set up the program correctly. Set-up should be easy. The first dashboards, after all, were on horse-drawn buggies. Far from those horse-andbuggy
days, most professional analytics programs require experienced professionals to configure them. Google Analytics is strictly DIY, beginning with the simplest dashboards first. The more complex settings are no more than a few clicks deep.


Analytics Settings
When you log in to Google Analytics, the first page is the Analytics Settings
dashboard shown in Figure 5-1. This dashboard is your gateway to creating
and managing your profiles, controlling access to those profiles, and setting
filters.


The main (top) menu bar of the Analytics Settings dashboard has two basic
choices: Analytics Settings and View Reports. If you have more than one profile,
you can select which one you’d like to view from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 5-2. Otherwise, the default profile (whichever one you added first) will load when you click View Reports. Jerri has only one web site profile in her account, her freelancer’s site, www.JerriLedford.com.

If you’ve been given access to profiles in another account, you will have a
second drop-down menu on the far right. As Figure 5-3 shows, this is the menu
that contains the different accounts connected via your Google Analytics
account. For example, the www.JerriLedford.com profile is the default in Jerri’s
account, whereas the SkateFic profile is in Mary’s account. Using the Access
Manager, Mary gave Jerri administrative privileges to the SkateFic profile. Jerri
can see all the metrics and make changes to settings in the SkateFic profile.