Google Analytics user access management
Access Management is another option you’ll find in most web analytics tools. It’s the ability to enable others (colleagues, manager, administrator or simply partner) to look into and control (optional) Google Analytics reports.
Sharing a single account might not be something one would naturally do and it might be something that makes many people nervous (accidental changes or mistakes made by others can be extremely frustrating), but thankfully the GA Access Manager lets you control who has access and to what degree they can manipulate settings.
Something to be careful with is user access when you track multiple websites within the same account. Should you enable other users to access your account with administrator privileges, they will be able to view reports for your other sites as well. Should you want to avoid other users from seeing reports for sites that they do not need to look into you can choose to grant access only to a single website profile (rather than providing them with access to the whole account), but only for “Read only” users, not administrator enabled users. This can be done within the Access Manager, but also by editing Website Profile settings.
You can find the Access Manager option at the bottom of the Analytics Settings page, and this will take you to the Access Management settings dashboard. Here you can add users and manage user access.
Adding a User
- Once you’ve opened the Access Manager, you can add a user by clicking the Add User option in the right hand corner of the Existing Access table (which shows you the current users)
- Enter the new user’s information: Enter a Google email address (Sign up for a new Google Account, if necessary) and enter first and last name
- With Access Type, you can determine to which extent the new user can access your Google Analytics account. You can opt to allow the user only to view reports or you can allow them to be an account administrator (thereby allowing them to edit account and report settings). IMPORTANT NOTE: If you set the new user account to Administrator, you will not be able to limit the new user from seeing other website profiles!
- If you set Access type to View reports only, you will need to specify which specific Website Profiles the new user can access
- Click Finish and provide the new user with their new Google Analytics credentials
Tip: In case you need to share data for a particular part of the site with, say, another department within your organization, you can choose to set up tracking in separate profiles (with separate users). You can choose to separate your website store and provide Sales with their own profile, whilst other marketing executives would be happy viewing only the content part of your site.
Deleting a User
Of course, the standard option of deleting users is also available and can be done by selecting the Delete option for the user in question, in the Access Manager. Be careful – once users are deleted this can’t be undone and you’ll have to set user access from scratch.
As the “other user”, once someone’s granted me access to a profile… where would I expect to see that profile? I’ve logged into my GA account, but can’t see any new sites to view.
Got it. Turns out that even if more than one person grants you access, you can only see one account at a time. (My problem was that a second person had granted access to a site, but I could still only see the sites from the first account.) Seems a bit silly to me, hopefully Google will sort it out.
I completely agree. This is something Google needs to address as it’s currently not very clear how this works.
Once a user gets granted access to a website profile of another account, they will only see the newly added website profile when they log in to their own account.
You’ll have to switch accounts in the top right corner to see your own website profiles again.
Google should just provide a complete overview upon login – One table for your own website profiles and another for user access granted profiles of other accounts.