The ‘issue’ only arises after the clients engage an internet marketer, who will want to access the site’s Analytics information to better understand the website’s history and traffic characteristics.

Analytics enthusiasts like myself will refine the Analytics settings for improved reporting, specific investigations etc which requires Admin access, and this is where the problem emerges.

Granting Analytics Admin to enable these refinements, also provides access to all profiles;
ie the web dev’s others client’s in that Analytics account.

This is not desirable from either the web dev or the internet marketer’s perspective, and as a result admin rights are not typically granted. This in turn impedes the internet marketer’s ability to deliver services.

Solutions
A simplistic approach is to create a new Analytics account for the client and abandon the web dev’s profile; however this effectively means losing historical web traffic data.

My preferred approach is to use two Analytics accounts in tandem:

• Retain the original account with the client/Internet marketer having read only access
• Create an additional Analytics account that is ‘owned’ by the client, with admin rights granted to the internet marketer.
  Analytics provides the ability to feed web tracking data simultaneously to two independent Analytics accounts – handy hey!

This approach:

• Preserves the website history so it is accessible by all interested parties (web dev, client & internet marketer)
• Places the ownership of web traffic data back with the client (where it should be!) This allows the client to retain their internet statistics even if they move to another web dev or internet marketer.

Checking your Analytics account
You can readily determine if the Analytics ‘account’ on your site is one of many sub-accounts by inspecting the UA number which looks similar to “UA-628649-1″ .

The final section (-1 in this case) indicates the Analytics profile number.
If the profile number is larger than the number of websites you have (eg 15) , then it is likely this is your web devs Analytics account and you are actually one of many profiles or sub-accounts within it.

Summary
In summary web traffic data is an important piece of data about your businesses, so I recommend that you take control of it and ensure you ‘own’ it.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This industrial strength yet surprisingly free website metrics system can help you understand more about how your site is performing and give clues on how to improve it to ultimately make it a viable contributor to your business sales activities.

The upgrade includes:

• More sophisticated goal tracking
• Better table filtering
• More flexible reporting
• A threshold based alerting system

Read more…

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Actually it is really what visitor activity tells you, and the only way to ‘hear’ this is through interpreting website statistics.

In this case the client had a temporary parking web page while they underwent the arduous task of implementing a new website.

Recently installed, Analytics (my fav web metrics tool) revealed that the site was attracting visitors from searches nicely aligned with this client’s business and in their target geography. Great news!

The bad news was Analytics revealed these visitors were immediately abandoning the site, apparently unimpressed with the parking page.

Until I revealed this today the business had no idea how many sales opportunities it had lost, and as you would expect, the website refurbishment is now a top priority.

How may sales leads are you loosing because you can’t hear what your website telling you ?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.