Accounts and Profiles

The Google Analytics account management consists of a number of layers that allow for a great deal of flexibility, both in tracking web properties, and in allowing other users access to your reports. This document provides a conceptual overview to the features and the terms used in Analytics account management so that you can determine the best way to set up report administration for your web property.

1. Google Accounts
2. Web Property
3. Analytics Accounts
4. Profiles
5. Sharing Analytics Accounts
6. Examples

Google Accounts

Many Google products use Google Accounts to authenticate their users, such as Google Calendar, Blogger, and Gmail. Google Analytics also uses Google Accounts to authenticate users. In order to use Google Analytics or access reports, you must sign in with a Google Account user name and password.

Web Property

A web property is defined as the conjunction of a URL and a particular business model. For example, youtube.com is considered a web property, as are most single-entity websites. Additionally, the URL for your gadget is also considered a web property, even though the scope of its use is much narrower than many websites. In Google Analytics, a single web property is always tracked in at least one profile. For example, if your online store and blog are hosted on different domains, each would have their own Analytics profile. Your gadget would also have its own profile. However, a given property can be tracked in more than one profile as well, such as when you are tracking a very large website for independent content stakeholders.

In the Analytics tracking code, the web property for a profile has a unique ID, which is a combination of the account ID and additional digits. It links web properties to profiles in Analytics accounts. This web property ID (informally referred to as UA number), can be found in the administrative section of the Analytics UI, or by searching for UA- in the source code of your web page. The web property ID has two parts: the X's (UA-XXXXX-YY) represent your account number and the Y's (UA-XXXXXX-YY) represent profile numbers within your account. The complete string (UA-XXXXX-YY) is referred to interchangably as your web property ID or UA number. For example:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-10876-1");

Here, UA-10876-1, defines the web property ID for account 10876 and it is the first profile for that account. A second profile for the same account that tracks an additional web property might use UA-10876-2 for the web property ID.

Analytics Accounts

An Analytics account is way for you to name and organize how you track one or more web properties using Google Analytics. It is purely an administrative feature of Google Analytics and does not require separate user sign-in. Additionally, you can use an Analytics Account in any number of ways, depending upon your site's requirements and level of complexity. Each Google Analytics user has at least one account, and in that account at least one web property (such as a website) that is being tracked.

Account Organization

The two most common ways to use Analytics accounts are:

• By work function
Often, a single Analytics account tracks multiple web properties that are related by function. For example, you might have an Analytics account for your personal web properties that you name My Websites. In this profile, you would track your personal website and your blog, which are separate properties. In this case, you install one tracking code snippet on your website pages, and use a separate one for your blog. In addition to this account, you might also have a separate Analytics account that you use to track business-related web properties. In this way, you create an easy way to administer personal and work properties independently.
• By web property
You can also set up an Analytics Account to track a single web property only. This is the recommended way to set up Analytics if the domain you are tracking is large and has a number of contributors interested in viewing reports across that property. For instance, suppose you are the administrator for example.com, which has a number of sub-directories. For this website each sub-directory represents the business efforts of distinct departments within the company, such as products and support. Additionally each department wants to track their section of the website independently from others. In such a case, you could set up a single Analytics account for the entire site, and use distinct reporting profiles within the account to provide meaningful reporting data for all interested website contributors. In this way, you only install the tracking code for the website once, and any difference in reporting views are handled by the administrative interface.

Account ID

When you create an account in Google Analytics, your account is provided with a unique ID. This ID is included in the tracking code that you include in the source code for your website or gadget. For example, suppose the tracking code for your site uses the web property ID UA-10876-1 as part of its tracking code, like this:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-10876-1");

The parts of the tracking codes are:

• UA, which stands for "Urchin Analytics."
• 10876, which is the account ID affiliated uniquely with your Analytics Accounts
• 1, which is the ID affiliated with one of the profiles in your account. All profiles listed in your account will use that same 5-digit number as part of the tracking code.

Profiles

Analytics profiles provide an additional level of tracking in the Analytics Administrative interface. First, remember that an Analytics account can be used either to track only one web property, or to track many web independent properties. When you use a single Analytics account to track multiple independent properties, you accomplish this by assigning a single profile to each distinct property tracked in your account. Think of a profile as a "reporting profile" that defines the "site" for your reports. In this scenario, the profile defines the separate tracking for the web properties, and this is reflected in the reports, which do not share user data. Here, each profile has defined the scope of data as the site to track based on the domain that you have provided in the profile.

If you only track a single web property in your Analytics account, you can also use multiple profiles to provide different views, or "reporting profiles" for the single web property. Fo example, if you use a single Analytics account to track a very large website, you could define one profile to track the entire site, and another profile which uses a filter to track only a portion of that site. The reports for the portion of the site would then display user data only for that section, with all other information considered as external. For more information on how to configure profiles, see the Help Center section for managing profiles.

Sharing Analytics Reports

You share your Analytics reports with other people who have Google Accounts. Those users who want to view your reports must first enable their Google Account for Analytics access (see the main Analytics website for info).

When you share your reports with other users, you can control which specific reports they have access to. This is accomplished first by giving a user access to a specific account that holds the report profile you want to share. Once users have access to your account, you can also control which profile they have access to. So for example, if you want to let your colleagues view the Analytics reports for your gadget, but not for your blog or your website, you can give them access to your account, and then access only to the profile that you have set to track your gadget.

Once your colleagues have access to the reports, the account name appears as a separate selection in the Accounts drop-down menu of the administrative interface. Once they select the account from the menu, they will see only those profiles that you have granted them access to. In this way, you can control access to your Analytics reports at multiple levels. Additionally, it is common for Analytics users to have access to a variety of Analytics accounts, both their own and others.

Examples

The following table shows all of the examples mentioned in this document in one logical structure, and describes how the different account setups affect reporting in Analytics.

Account Name	Profile Name	URL	Web Property ID	What Gets Reported
My Personal Properties	My Blog	example.blogspot.com	UA-10876-1	All user activity for example.blogspot.com. No activity on any other part of blogspot.com is contained in the Analytics reports, so a user coming from www.blogspot.com to example.blogspot.com is considered an external referral in the reports, and users going from example.blogspot.com to some other blog on blogspot.com would be reported as exiting the site.
	My Whole Website	www.example.com	UA-10876-2	All user activity for example.com. If you provided a link from example.com to your blog, the reports for your blog would list your site as a referring site.
	My Gadget	84632.gmodules.com	UA-10876-3	All user activity for your gadget. This profile is shared with your friend, but your friend sees this as the only profile listed under the "My Personal Properties" account, even though you have set up two other profiles.
My Single Website for Work	The whole website	www.googleanalytics.com	UA-18988-1	All user activity for googleanalytics.com, including activity on the product section and the support section.
	The product team's reports	www.googleanalytics.com/products	UA-18988-1	If implemented with a filter, reports will show mainly user activity for googleanalytics.com/products. User activity on other sections of the site is considered "outside" the site from the definition of the profile. For example, total pageviews would be only for this section of the site, and not for the entire example.com. Time on page and time on site would apply only to the pages being tracked.
	The support team's reports	www.googleanalytics.com/support	UA-18988-1	If implemented with a filter, shows only user activity for googleanalytics.com/support. User activity on other sections of the site is considered "outside" the site from the definition of the profile.

The following diagram illustrates the account and profile relationship in Google Analytics, with each element indicated as a separate entity in the diagram. When reading this diagram, start with either the account, profile, or web property and read to the item it relates to. Thus, a given profile can only belong in one Analytics account, but an Analytics account can have one or more profiles.