Working with website profiles in Google Analytics

In order to use advanced settings for Google Analytics, log in to your account and you’ll land on the settings dashboard straight away.

Website Profiles

GA offers the option to track multiple websites within the same account, which is a handy feature that most web analytics tools offer these days. Besides completely separate sites, you can create profiles to track subdomains or parts of a single website separately. On the settings dashboard you’ll notice a table of Website profiles, which gives you an overview of sites currently tracked and their tracking status.

Adding a profile

1. In the Website Profiles table, click Website Profile
2. An information page appears, which offers you the option to add a profile for a new domain or an existing domain (in case you’d like to track part of one of your sites or a subdomain).
3. In case you’re adding a profile for a new domain, select whether the site is an HTTP or HTTPS site, provide the website URL which you’d like to track and select your country from the drop-down list, and click Continue. In case you’d like to add a profile for an existing domain, select the domain in question, enter a new profile name, select your country from the drop-down list, and click Finish.
4. If you’re creating a profile for a new domain, the Tracking Status screen will show up, providing you with the script you’ll need to place on all pages of your sites (or in your site’s templates).

Once you’ve added the code to your website, Google Analytics will change the tracking status of the new profile to Pending and to Receiving Data when enough data has been gathered to start reporting. Keep in mind, however, that to make sense of your reporting data you’ll need at least a couple of months’ worth of data!
So why would you set up separate profiles for parts/subdomains of your sites? The main benefit is that you can adjust specific settings for each part. This can be particularly handy in case you’d like to use customized segmentation more than once on the same site. (Customized segmentation can generally be used for one specific purpose in Google Analytics.)

Should conversion paths go through other parts/subdomains, you can adjust the Google Analytics code and track a single page in multiple accounts.

Editing a profile

Profiles can be edited by clicking the Edit option on the Website Profiles dashboard, located in the same row as the website profile you’d like to edit. Once you click Edit, the settings dashboard for the selected site profile will open, which is subdivided into separate settings tabs:

• Main Website Profile Information: This tab allows you to change basic settings, such as changing the profile name or the URL of the site you’re tracking, to set the default page (e.g. index.html). You can add “query paramaters” (the bits and bobs some site show behind the file name of a page, for example: page.htm?cid=123&sid=456 – these values could screw up tracking so if your site uses these, you’ll want to tell GA your site uses query parameters), you can set your time zone and currency settings and which reports you’d like to have access to within the site profile
• Conversion Goals and Funnel: This tab allows you to set the conversion goals for your site profile. A conversion goal is a particular page on your site which you want visitors to reach. This could be the thank you page which is shown after a registration form or shopping cart checkout. You can specify up to ten goals for each profile. Learn more about this option in Setting up and working with Goals
• Filters Applied to Profile: By using filters you can get more accurate measurements of the traffic on your site. You can opt to filter out visitors from specific IP addresses (for example, your organization’s IP address – to avoid internal use to skew up your website data) but you can also filter out traffic coming from specific domains, for example. More about this in Setting up and working with Filters
• Users with Access to Profile: Usually in larger organizations, multiple report users will want to be able to access data for a particular site profile. You can choose to provide View only access, or set administrator privileges.

Deleting profiles

Even though this is not an option you’re likely to use any time soon, it’s good to know you have the option to delete profiles. It could be that you’ll set up a new account and will want to start tracking a particular site in your own (private) account, rather than one shared with other sites. Be careful – All data will be permanently deleted if you opt to delete a profile. Be sure to export your data should you choose to take this route, even though there is currently no import option in Google Analytics that would allow you to use the old data for comparison with fresh data.