Google Analytics 101 – Easy Fundamentals

Google Analytics Made Easy – Overview

Google Analytics can be overwhelming and intimidating.  It doesn’t have to be. We want it not to be.  We know how important it is for us to be able to track our sites’ performance easily.  Therefore in Google Analytics 101 series, we will approach it in small, bearable bite size pieces.

Google Analytics User Interface

What do you see when you log into your GA account?

GA interface changes over time.  Right now (April 2015) it looks as per below when you:

Google Analytics Admin interface

You can see straightaway that there are “Account”, “Property”, and “View” columns.

Account, Property, View

Don’t be frightened. Don’t be turned off.  I just want to introduce you to the three of the most basic and core concepts in Google Analytics: Accounts, Properties, Views.

How Many Can You Have?

Within each Google login, you can have:

• 100 Accounts
• Each Account can have up to 50 Properties
• Each Property can have up to 25 Views

For most of us non-techies, we will probably only need to use 1 Account.

Note the drop-down arrows for Account, Property, View.  If you have multiple of any of these, you can click the down-down arrow to select them.

Focusing just on Account, Property, and View for now – there is a hierarchy, visually depicted as follows:

Google Analytics Hierarchy

Illustrative Scenario

For most of us lay people, we can do with just one account.

If you have multiple domains, you only need to set up one Account.  And for each of your domains, you can set them up as a Property under that one Account. Each Property will have their own individual tracking code.

Then for each Property, you can set up various Views.  We will get to all these, one step at a time.

Summary

We have now been introduced to and will becoming increasingly familiar with Account, Property, View. As basic as these are, they will help us to finally understand a lot more of our Analytics data and reports.

Next, we will walk-through how to quickly create new Account within Google Analytics.

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Footnote:
There are various ways you can set up your GA.  For various ways to organize, see Example account structures from Analytics Help Center.

Reference: