RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

Three ways Google Analytics can improve sharing

Posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 11:42 AM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

Here at Commune, we configure and manage many client Google Analytics accounts. Recently, in working on an analytics project with many users, custom reports and advanced segments, some challenges emerged. I’m under no illusion that the Google Analytics crew will act solely on our recommendation. But hopefully others can join us in pushing for three changes to improve sharing:

1. Improve one-to-many management of client analytics accounts. Google AdWords (in which we do search engine marketing management) makes it easy to manage multiple client accounts. Google Analytics, less so. What would be ideal is one master client-management account for which all associated users could manage all child accounts. Additionally, cross-account reporting could be enabled at the client-management account level.
2. Facilitate easier sharing of custom reports and advanced segments with all users of a profile. Currently, the only way to share custom reports and advanced segments is by sending other profile users a link, which they must click to install a custom report or segment into their Google Analytics instance. This becomes quite cumbersome when you have even a few reports, segments and users. What would be ideal is the ability to share reports and segments with all profile users the way you can share goals, filters and other profile-level configurations.
3. Allow an unlimited number of custom reports to have the same name. Granted, this might cause some problems under the current sharing model, but I find it frustrating that you can’t create a report with the same name, but different features, in multiple profiles. I understand some of the thinking here. A report called, say, “Top Content by Location” might apply in every profile. But once you start configuring reports around, say, goals, all bets are off unless two profiles have the same goals. For example, if a report shows “Top Content by Whitepaper Download,” and the download refers specifically to a goal 1 configured in the profile, then the report is useless in other profiles unless they also have a whitepaper download configured for the same goal. However, they might have a whitepaper download configured for goal 2. Yet under the current model, it wouldn’t be possible to name another custom report “Top Content by Whitepaper Download.”

I fear that this has now become a rant, largely because a tiny percentage of Google Analytics users will even understand what I’m talking about, and I haven’t quite provided the description or graphics necessary to broaden accessibility.

But the bottom line is this: if Google is serious about creating an ecosystem of analytics consultants (and it appears to be quite interested), we need more features to facilitate the kind of work that entails. Beginning with some improved sharing features.

Unless I’m completely off the mark here. Anyone have suggestions for addressing these challenges (besides, of course, lobbying Google)?

Tags: advanced segments, custom reports, google analytics