Google Analytics is the most powerful tool for tracking the performance of your website and applications. It provides you with all that is required to track and get an in-depth analysis of your website’s visitors. This tool is the key to shaping a success strategy for your business. You may already know all that - but have you ever tried setting up your own Google Analytics account? If you have then you also know that the first step in setting it up is creating your account and organizing it.
Setting up the Google Analytics Hierarchy is the key step to ensuring that you get all the relevant data in the most organized way. Doing this includes working with various entities like organizations, properties, views, and accounts. What are each of these and why are they important in SEO? This is exactly what we are going to uncover in this guide.
Organizations are available only in the Google Analytics 360 interface - if you are using the free version, you will not have organizations. An organization acts as the hub of all your users, product accounts, billing information, and product integrations. It’s aimed at larger organisations who may have multiple Google Analytics accounts all needing to report to the same place, but as an ‘organization’ is just a simple grouping of accounts, any entity that has multiple Google Analytics accounts and Google Analytics 360 can utilise them.
Organizations also group all of your solutions in a single place - namely Tag Manager, Data Studio, Optimize, Audience Centre, and Surveys apart from Google Analytics itself. Do not worry about the rest of those products- they are part of the GA 360 Suite, but for analyzing and measuring the traffic, GA is all that you will use.
An organization is more than just a shell- it provides you with a way to streamline your entire account management procedure. While organizations do not directly influence your SEO ranking, they provide you with a more efficient way to manage it all, especially when you have a company with multiple websites.
Organizations simplify user management, audit existing users and their privileges, and collect all relevant data at once place for better overview and analysis.
Once you create an organization, the next step is creating an Account. Let us see what that is for.
Accounts act as the access point for GA. Every account is attached to an organization, and you will require at least one account to access Analytics. Multiple accounts can be tied to a single organization. These accounts are more than just access points, however, and play a crucial role for the SEO professional.
Accounts help the SEO professional ensure that stakeholders can access only that data which is relevant and belongs to them. For instance, if you are managing multiple accounts and reporting for several clients, you should avoid consolidating their properties in a single account. Furthermore, you should also limit stakeholder access to the ‘account’ level . This ensures that they can access only the properties that belong to them.
Additionally, stakeholders can be provided with admin access at the account level. This enables them to collaborate, edit, and analyze reports, as well as manage access for other users.
A property can be a website, mobile app, or a device (like a PoS or kiosk). Properties are what Google Analytics collects data for. After adding a property to your account, GA provides you with a tracking code that is used for data collection. This tracking code contains a unique identifier for data sent by the property. This unique ID is what makes the data identifiable in your report.
An account can have multiple properties under it (up to a maximum of 50 properties per account), but a property can only be associated with a single website (or device or mobile app).
Properties are the entities for which you are performing SEO. A URL is required if the property is a website. For mobile apps, you need to connect to Firebase, which is Google’s development platform for mobile applications. SEO experts ensure that the data entered while creating the property- not just the name, but also the time zone and industry category are accurate. This ensures reporting can be done efficiently and with the right data set.
After creating a web property, the default reporting view named All Web Site Data is created by Analytics. A view is the access point for reports created by Analytics’ data. A property can have multiple views inside it. The ‘All Web Site Data’ view does not have any filters applied and includes all the data for that specific property.
It is important to note that the data shown in a view would be from the date the view was created. For instance, if you create a new view on January 1, then it would show data from January 1 onwards, but no data collected before that date. Once a view is deleted, the data in it is deleted forever- there is no way of getting it back.
Views are the most useful aspect of Google Analytics. You can create several custom views to help you with analyzing website traffic and testing multiple things. The default view gives you complete details on all the traffic on your website (or Property). Keeping it unfiltered ensures that you always have quick access to all the raw data about your website traffic.
For instance, a test view, created out of the main view, is helpful in testing out new views or ways of presenting information. Using a test view ensures that in case any permanent changes take place during testing, the main view is not affected.
An IP-filtered view can help you to see data with traffic from a specific range filtered out. This is useful for seeing data that does not have your visits to the website distorting it. Location-bound businesses can create filtered views based on geographical locations. This helps in tracking traffic from their target market.
Similarly, views can be created based on subdomains, devices, and many other parameters. Each view helps you to analyze and gain insights from the data, and in turn to generate more traffic and customize strategies.
Organizations, accounts, and properties are used for organizing Google Analytics’ structure, while views help to analyze the data, test new features, and are used for reporting . For instance, an Analytics manager for an organization can create users at all levels - Account, Property, and View. This ensures that the right set of people have access to the right data - and nothing more.
Organizations that have multiple websites can create one property for each to track the data across all of them. Admins and users can also be assigned to each property for better tracking, management, and analysis.
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools in marketing and setting it up correctly can really help you make the most of it’s capabilities. Using the right organization and account structure with all the relevant views is the first step to doing just that. This guide should help you to get on the path towards unlocking the power of Google Analytics for the success of your business/clients.