How to share access to your Google Analytics account

Google Analytics is a web-based analytics service that tracks & reports the traffic on your website and is used by most businesses these days. The service lets you measure your advertising return on investment and also allows you to track your social networking sites and applications.

But the functionality of Analytics has grown massively since it was first introduced in 2005. Many businesses will now also seek the help of a digital marketing agency if they don’t do their own marketing in-house. You might also manage several divisions of the same business or a parent company. For this reason, you may need to share access to your Analytics account.

To make sure that your accounts are streamlined, Google often uses the same login to access all aspects of its services, such as Analytics, AdWords and even Gmail. You may have set up access to these different tools using a different login but it is more than likely that you access your accounts with the same login for ease of use. You can login into Analytics here, and this is the screen you should come across below. It’s the same screen for most of your other Google accounts.

For this reason, you wouldn’t want to give out your login and password to someone as they would potentially be able to access all of your accounts, including confidential emails, when all you wanted to do was give them access to Analytics. However, sharing access to your Analytics account is simple. When you arrive at the analytics homepage, your screen should look something like this.

Sharing access with someone

There are a number of ways that you can share access to your Analytics account. This allows you to customise who you share access to your account with and allows you to be more restrictive. One thing that you should consider before granting someone access to your account is what kind of permission you want to give them. This comes in two steps, accounts and permissions.

Accounts; There are 3 types of account levels with different kinds of access to Analytics. The account level gives access to all levels of your Analytics and is the most common. The property level grants access to one of the websites or applications you are tracking, so you should use this if you manage several accounts. The views level only grants access to a defined set of data and not the whole website.

Permissions; The other restriction you can add to the account is to give a new user different permissions. User permissions allow you to restrict the amount of changes a user can make to your account. This includes whether they can add or manage users, perform administrative tasks or just read and analyse the data. If you have a limited understanding of Google Analytics, it is common for an agency to request Administrator access, as this gives them the ability to create conversions and sort any issues you may have. There’s a more in-depth explanation here.

Add a User

1. Sign into your Analytics account
2. In the left hand menu, you will notice the “Admin” cog wheel at the bottom of the list, select this.
3. Choose which level you want to add the user, account, property or view and click Account Access Management.
4. On the right hand side you will notice a dark blue plus button, click this and select add users.
5. Enter their email address and select the permission level you want to grant.
6. Choose to notify the user by email so they know they’ve been granted access.
7. Now all you have to do is click add and they are granted access.

*PLEASE NOTE: The permission level is automatically set by Google to viewer access. This is fine if you only want your agency or users to check stats, but to create conversion actions or solve issues you will need to grant the user Administrator access.

If you are still unsure about anything to do with Google Analytics or have some other questions that you want to ask then feel free to get in touch. We provide digital marketing services for a wide range of clients and could help you get the most out of your marketing!