A question that I regularly get is “How do I grant access to my Google Analytics account?“.
This often happens when a new Google Ads client starts working with us and we ask for access to their Google Analytics account as well. Why do we need access? Well, we need to ensure that Google Ads / Analytics are linked, that conversion goals are in place and typically use Google Analytics to create audience lists for future remarketing campaigns. The bottom line though is that if you have a website, you should have Google Analytics installed. If you do, you should make sure that you are the Administrator of your account. This isn't always the case if set-up by a third party. This video shows you how to add a user to Google Analytics:Transcript
OK, this video aims to show a user, an admin user how to add other users to their Google Analytics account.
A common scenario would be that for a website owner, they've got Google Analytics, it's possible that it was created by a third party, and they need to make sure that they've got access. Ultimately, my belief is that your Google Analytics account is your account, and what you don't want to do every time you change web hosts or web designers is to create a new account. The account should follow you, not the service provider.
So, you've logged into Google Analytics, so analytics.google.com, and down the bottom left hand corner of the nav bar there, you've got admin, so you click on that cog and you get presented with this area. And you've got the account, and treat the account like your company, basically. You've got the property. Properties are basically domains. And then you've got views, which we don't need to worry about today, but a domain can have multiple views. So, for example, might be that you have a second view where you exclude internal traffic.
But for today, all we're interested in is giving another user access to your account. So under the account level, and, again, you can see you've got user management at the viewing property level, but for this instance, under the account level, we click on user management. This is just my personal domain, there's nothing there, so there's only one user, which is me, and obviously I've already got access using my company email address.
But in this scenario, let's say I would click on the plus sign in the top right hand corner to give another user access, and I would type in another Google account, and it's important to understand that this email address is going to be an email address that's associated with a Google account. You can't just put in any random email and it would work. If it is a first time using an email, then Google would then invite you to create a Google account, but most of us have already got an email address that's associated with Google, because we use other services, such as Google Ads, or Gmail, or Google Photos, whatever it might be.
Under the settings here, you've got various permissions, edit, collaborate, read analyse and manage users, and, again, you just need to read those, understand what they mean, and check the boxes accordingly. For people like myself as a third party, that would be what I would ask for by default, and then the optional backup of having the ability to manage users, but, of course, if you give a third party manage user access, then that person can invite other users into your account, so you may not want to add that in most scenarios.
And that's it. Top right hand corner again, you click on add, and you've now got two users added to your Google Analytics account, and life is good.
