In this article I will show you, how to structure your Google Analytics account when you own/manage multiple websites, subdomains, mobile apps and/or you have got a very high traffic website.

Understanding Google Analytics Account Hierarchy

A Google Analytics Account is made up of one or more properties.

A Google Analytics property (which can be a website, mobile app or point of sales device) is made up of one or more reporting views.

A Google Analytics view (also known as reporting view) is made up of several reports.

How Many Google Analytics Accounts Do You Need?

If you own/manage only one company then you need only one GA account. If you own/manage multiple companies then you should be using multiple GA accounts.

The rule of thumb is one GA property per company. Unless you are a business conglomerate or an agency, you most likely need only one Google Analytics account.

Note: Under one Google login, you can create/add as many Google Analytics account as you want.

How Many Google Analytics Properties Do You Need?

As a rule of thumb, use one GA property for each website. So, if you own/manage only one website then you need only one GA property. If you own/manage two websites then you need one GA property per website i.e. two properties.

If you are an agency that is in charge of setting up and managing Google Analytics on behalf of their clients then you would need multiple GA accounts and properties. One GA account per client and one property per website.

If you own/manage a mobile app in addition to a website then you would need one GA property for the desktop website and one GA property for each mobile platform-specific app (IOS, Android app).

For example, if you have got: one website, one mobile app for IOS device and one mobile app for Android device then you would need three GA properties.

One GA property for the website, one firebase property for IOS and one firebase property for Android:

You should also consider setting up one GA property just for testing purposes.

Note: Under one Google Analytics account, you can create/add up to 50 GA properties.

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How Many Google Analytics Views Do You Need?

You would need one GA view which contains unfiltered data. You must always maintain one unfiltered view as data once incorrectly filtered cannot be unfiltered.

You would need one GA view which contains traffic only from your target market. For example, if your target market is only the US then your view should collect data, only from the US.

Otherwise, you would end up analysing the website usage data of people from all over the world instead of just from the US. By default, Google Analytics view, report traffic from all over the world. Now, the problem with such type of traffic is that it skews all of your website usage metrics from average time on page, bounce rate to goal conversion rate and ecommerce conversion rate.

You would need one GA view just for testing purposes. You can use this view for testing new Google Analytics configurations like filters.

Apart from these three views, you may need many more reporting views depending upon, how you want to segment the data.

Read the following article to know about the various GA views that I recommend: 10 Google Analytics Views that you must always use

Note: Under one Google Analytics Property, you can create/add up to 25 GA views.

Visual Representation of Google Analytics Account Setups

Following is the Google Analytics Account Setup for business owners who own only one website:

Following is the Google Analytics Account Setup for business owners who own multiple websites/subdomains:

Following is the Google Analytics Account Setup for marketing consultants/agencies or business owners who own multiple companies and websites:

One GA Property for Closely Connected Websites

When two or more websites together provide a complete user experience then such types of websites are known as ‘closely connected websites’. For example, if your website checkout process occurs on a different website then your website and the other website are closely connected websites.

Similarly, if your website checkout process occurs on a different sub-domain then your primary domain and the sub-domain are closely connected websites.

So if your website checkout process occurs on a different subdomain then use one GA property to track both the primary domain and subdomain. In this way, you can track customer purchase journeys across domains.

For example: Let’s say your website address is www.abc.com but the checkout is hosted on store.abc.com. In that case, use one GA property for both the primary domain and subdomain. You can do that by installing the same Google Analytics tracking code on all of the pages of both the primary domain and subdomain.

However, if store.abc.com also sell products that you can directly buy from the website without first travelling through www.abc.com then you should set up two GA properties:

One GA property for tracking users across the primary domain and subdomain. One GA property for tracking users’ activities only on the subdomain.

So you would need to install two different Google Analytics tracking code on the subdomain. You can do that by using multiple trackers.

One GA Property for Each Business Vertical

If you set up one subdomain for each business vertical then set up one GA property for each business vertical.

Let’s say your website address is www.abc.com and you have set up the following subdomains for different business verticals:

• music.abc.com for selling products related to music
• games.abc.com for selling products related to gaming
• finance.abc.com for selling products related to finance.

In that case:

• set up one GA property for www.abc.com
• set up one GA property for each business vertical.
• set up one GA property that consolidates data from all GA properties. We call such property as rollup property.

With the help of rollup property, you can understand the overall performance of your company across all business verticals.

Now instead of subdomains, let us suppose that you have set up one website for each business vertical.

Let’s say your primary website is www.abc.com and you have set up the following websites for different business verticals:

• www.abcmusic.com for selling products related to music
• www.abcgames.com for selling products related to gaming
• www.abcfinance.com for selling products related to finance.

In that case, also, you should:

1. set up one GA property for www.abc.com
2. set up one GA property for each business vertical.
3. set up one GA Rollup property that consolidates data from all GA properties.

No Rollup Property for Mobile App(s) and Website(s) Data

Mobile App Analytics and Website Analytics are two completely different types of tracking. They both use their own set of metrics.

In addition to that, user behaviour on a mobile app is quite different from users’ behaviour on a website. So you should not try to consolidate mobile app and website tracking data in one GA property. Keep them separate.

Setting up Multiple GA Properties to Fix Data Sampling Issues

If your website gets more than half a million sessions a month and you are not planning to use GA Premium/360 then you should consider tracking different sections of your website via different properties.

This is because data sampling occurs at the property level and the probability of Google Analytics to sample the data increases when a user query is based on more than 500,000 sessions.