I noticed that you had all your customer’s websites under your Google Analytics account, rather than having a separate account for each customer. How do those customers then access their Google Analytics? From what I can see, you add them as a user, but they have to have a Gmail address, is that correct?

I received this question from an associate of ours, and it can be a bit confusing!  As a service to all the websites we build, we now install Google Analytics and set it up to send them a monthly summary report.   On top of that, some of our customers use our Online Marketing services, and as such we review the Analytics on a monthly basis.

This means that both the Solve the Web team and the customer need to access the Google Analytics.  So, how do we set it up to allow this?

We started off by simply adding new profiles to our own Google Analytics accounts.  We’d then add the customer as a user, so they could see what we could see but we had the added advantage of seeing all our customers listed in our Analytics overview.

But you can only have about 30 profiles on one account, so we ran out of space!

Now we set the customer up with their own account, and profile, and add ourselves as Administrators.  It’s important that we add ourselves with the higher level of access as our customers want us to ‘administer’ the account for them.   From our own overview screens, we simply have to select a new account from the drop down list at the top right to change from customer to customer.

The other part of the question was whether or not a customer needed to have Gmail account to be able to access analytics.

They have to set up a Google Account, but, it’s not necessary to have a Google Mail account.
Signing up to ANY of the Google services creates an account, and that one account gives the person access to all other Google features.
So, our customers may have one or more of these already set up for their use: Google Mail, Google Calendar, Adwords, Blogger, Google base….. etc
The username they setup for this is what we’d use to set up their Analytics account.

If they have none of those, they can create an account at https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

We often create the account for them, to make it even easier!

So, if you don’t yet use Google Analytics on your website, I suggest you start now.  And the first step is to find out if you have already signed up to any Google services, and if not, get yourself a Google Account.

Enjoy!

Cat Young
www.solve-the-web.co.uk