Google Analytics profiles renamed


AnalyticsAccountWebChange
Google has made a change to the admin interface on Analytics (again). They have renamed profiles to views, in my opinion this is a good change views is a much better description.  The image above shows the change in the admin interface.   Lets take some time to understand the Analtyics account structure.

AnalyticsAccountSystem
The top level of the Analytics account structure is Account:   When you sign up for a Google Analtyics account you can use any email address you like, a lot of people think that they must us there gmail account this isn’t true.     If your company has a Google Analtyics account for there website it is a good idea to have any employees use there company email address for there Google Analtyics account.   The reason for this is is user management,  if an employee leaves the company you need to be able to remove there access to the company’s data.   If that employee used a company email address it will be easy to find them, if on the other hand they used some other email address it will make figuring out who’s access to revoke harder.     It would be nice if Google would add some kind of comment or not field to each user so that we could note who is who.

The second level is Property.   Property can be several different things.   It could be a website ,  a mobile application or a blog.   Your account can have access to any number of profiles.   For example I have access to the property for the website of the company I work for.    I also have several other properties for my website here and another for blog I have for non computer related things.

The last level is View (used to be profile)    A property can have any number of views.  Views let you customize the reports shown on the Google Analtyics website.    You could for example create one view that filters out any internal traffic.   You could have another view that only shows a specific directory or sub-domain.     You can also set a users permissions at the view level.   Lets say your company has a website in several different languages and you have offices in different countries.  You could create a view that would show the data for each language and they only allow the employees in those offices to see that data.

Now you should understand why I think that changing the name from profile to view is a good one.   A view is just that a little view into your data.   This is just a note but i like to keep one view set to default i like to call it Default this view is unfiltered raw Google Analtyics data.    I have other views with goals setup and different filters that lets me see only the data I want.

For all you Analytics developers out there.  There has been no change to the API,  ids is still the view id (profileid) as it used to be.    I wonder when they will change that name ids makes me think you could send more then one to the API in the same request.   YOU CAN’T …..


About Linda Lawton

My name is Linda Lawton I have more than 20 years experience working as an application developer and a database expert. I have also been working with Google APIs since 2012 and I have been contributing to the Google .Net client library since 2013. In 2013 I became a a Google Developer Experts for Google Analytics.

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