Verify your Google Analytics setup and understand the key limitations that might affect your data collection and reporting. Learn how to manage user roles, configure essential tracking settings, and ensure long-term data usability.
Key Insights
- Google Analytics imposes certain limits, such as a maximum of 2,000 properties per account, 50 data streams per property, and data retention capped at 14 months, which are more likely to impact large organizations.
- You can assign specific roles to users, such as Administrator, Editor, Marketer, Analyst, and Viewer, each with different permissions for managing settings, viewing reports, and editing configurations.
- GSUSA outlines important configuration options, including cross-domain tracking, custom dimensions and metrics, content grouping, and site search tracking, to ensure accurate and customized data collection.
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All right, so once you have the tag and the tracking code installed, you want to verify the installation. Make sure that, first of all, it's in the right place on the web, you know, the HTML pages, you know, the back end. And then you can wait for data to appear.
You know, see, it says that, you know, the next amount of hours data would appear. So, eventually, you're going to, usually, within a few hours, you're going to start to see data as people visit your website. So, that's the best way of knowing, hey, I see the data.
But you can also test the Google tag. Google provides a tool called Google Tag Assistant or Google Analytics Debugger, and you can use that to test the actual tags, you know, to ensure that the tags install correctly. Yes, you can get Google Analytics Debugger right from the Google Chrome store.
And the Google Tag Assistance, you can just Google it, and it's a very straightforward process. But, you know, before doing that, you should start appearing, and only do that if it doesn't appear. So, while Google Analytics can track and report on a significant amount of data, there are some limitations.
And these limitations relate to data collection, properties, custom dimensions and metrics, sampling, data retention, API request limits, user and account management limits, and data export limits. And we'll discuss what these limits are as we cover some of these areas. But, for example, in terms of the number of properties you can have for each account, you can have up to 2,000 properties per account and 50 data streams for each property.
So, I doubt if any one of us will ever hit up against that. We'll need more than 2,000 properties or more than 50 data streams per property. So, it's really some of these limits are more likely to affect or impact larger, much larger brands and organizations.
And in terms of data requests, you can have 25,000 tokens per day, which essentially is a request for data on a specific action. So, again, that's a significant amount of tokens that you can still access. And one other limit that might be of perhaps of most significance is data retention limits because of laws around privacy, data privacy, and considerations like that.
Google Analytics will only hold information, customer information, and customer activity information for up to 14 months. You can set it for shorter than that, but that's the maximum amount of time that Google Analytics will be able to keep data regarding engagement on your website. So, that's important, which is why you need to download reports as you go, so you will be able to archive older information that you refer back to.
Now, you can also set up different users on your account, and each of these users will have different permissions, right? So, the person who sets up the account will generally be the administrator or, you know, they have full control, and they can add and remove users, manage user permissions, meaning assigning the other roles to others who are using the account. They can create new properties and views, or excuse me, new properties as we did before. They can configure settings and access all data and reports, right? They can assign a role to an editor.
An editor can edit all data and settings for the account, but cannot manage users. So, the editor could do almost everything the administrator can, but cannot, but does not manage users. And then there are marketers.
Marketers, you know, essentially people who have, you know, run the marketing campaigns. They can edit audiences and key events. Again, some of these terms might not be familiar yet, but we'll discuss them, you know, over the next few sections.
Attribution models and events for each account. Many analysts. An analyst can share explorations.
We'll discuss what explorations are. It's more of a way of crunching the data and doing very customized reporting on the data. And a viewer.
A viewer can see the reports and configuration settings for the account, but they can see the data, but they can't impact it by creating events or, you know, doing explorations. So, to actually implement these roles or manage these roles, you would go to your admin here in the lower left. And account access management.
You would click on that. And here you would see, you know, who the administrator is and switch properties. You know, so the different people who might be involved in the account and the role that they have.
Administrator, marketer, administrator, etc. So, you would manage all that in that section of your Google Analytics account. So, here are some important Google Analytics configurations that we have covered, right? The account structure.
That's when you set up the account, and you want to manage the structure by grouping on property-based, you know, having the right properties, you know, essentially different properties for different websites, apps, or businesses that you want to track. So, understanding how you want to structure that if you are in a situation where you have multiple businesses, multiple brands. So, which of those do you want to have grouped together versus which of them do you want to look at separately? Filters.
We'll be discussing filters in the next section, but that's a way of more precisely defining the data that you want to have tracked in your account. There might be some activity that you don't want to track, such as activity from internal sources and developers, and we'll talk about that in the next section. Your goals in e-commerce tracking.
You have to determine which specific actions or conversions on your website you want to track, or app, or app. It could be form submissions, purchases, sign-ups, or other desired outcomes. So, that's a way that you will configure the data that Google Analytics will be tracking, right? Events.
We'll explain what an event is a little bit later, but again, those are the interactions that customers are taking on your website. We will identify some of these events as key events and other events as just events that you want to track. Custom dimension and metrics.
Dimensions and metrics are the way that data is tracked, so you have to determine if, in addition to the dimensions and metrics that Google by default tracks and provides, there are any custom ones that you want to build? And we'll discuss dimensions and metrics in more detail. Site search tracking. If your website has search functionality, a number of e-commerce websites will allow you to, you know, search the website, you know, catalog for certain products, etc.
would be one example of that. So, you can then, you know, decide to track, you know, data relating to search, including the keywords being used, etc. Content grouping.
This gives you the opportunity to group related pages of content together, so rather than just looking at them individually, you can look at them together. Again, a great example of this would be an e-commerce scenario, an e-commerce store, where perhaps you have men's shirts, and men's shirts could include polos, could include long sleeve shirts, could include t-shirts. So, you want to have those as individual pages, but when you track it, you want to track all the information for men's shirts.
So, that would be an example of content grouping. Cross-domain tracking. If your website spans multiple domains or subdomains, sometimes you may have a microsite, or you may have a regular site that provides information, and then to actually make the transition, a customer might switch over to an enrollment site.
So, you might want to be able to track activity from your homepage or your core site to any of these sub-sites, and you want to lump that information together. That would be cross-domain tracking. And then, finally, data retention and user deletion.
As I mentioned before, there is a 14-month limit on the amount, the longest amount of time you can retain data as custom related, you know, related to your website, but you can set it for shorter if you want. In some cases, maybe you're in a part of the world where the data restrictions are more stringent, and you can't keep it for 14 months. You can do that.
You can also set up automatic deletion at a certain point to ensure that the data comes off the website. These are all important Google Analytics configurations that you, as the administrator of Google Analytics account, will have, you know, some control over. So, that essentially covers setting up your account, right? In the next section, we're going to talk about filters, which is, I guess, one more aspect of setting up your account that's important, and then we'll start to get into some of the other terminology that we've been using, such as events, dimensions, metrics, audiences, etc.
