- [Instructor] While we wait for the data to start
populating your accounts.
We're thinking we would talk about how
we manage our account and keep it secure.
Overall, Google's goal has been to make
Googlytics both easy to use
but so incredibly powerful, which can be
a difficult balancing act.
Before we dive into the reports
and the analysis tools available,
let's discuss a few things about the
ecosystem of Google Analytics itself.
The first thing to talk about is how the levels
of Google Analytics are nested.
At the top of the hierarchy is the Google Analytics account.
This is your login, your password,
to all the Google services, Gmail, Hangouts,
Analytics, Adwords and so on.
As we've touched on before, you create
your Google Analytics account with your
overall Google user login.
And the difference between those two can be
a little bit confusing but it is important to know
that your account for Googlytics is different
than your Google account.
Now, while you start with one Google Analytics account
when you first begin using Google Analytics,
you can actually create numerous accounts
all nested under that one Google account,
according to your business needs.
This account level usually serves as the entity
for an entire business' analytics reporting.
So as long as you just have one singular business
you wanna report on, we suggest you just stick
to that one account for the business.
But you may consider having access to several accounts,
for example, your position requires analyzing
multiple client's websites, or like you see in this slide,
maybe you have one for your personal website,
and maybe one for your company.
And they're both tied back to your one account.
Or if your company has multiple brands
and you have multiple different sites,
that are completely unique entities,
you could add different accounts for those as well.
Now within an account is at least one property.
We generally recommend a business to have a property
for each website or platform.
And by platform, I mean for example,
if you have both a website and an application
for you business, like a mobile application,
you may have two properties,
and that will report on each individual platform.
So one for web, one for the mobile apps.
Now within each of those properties,
there's something called views.
Views are really powerful, and advanced users
are gonna find all kinds of ways to tweak them,
but they can be a little bit confusing at first.
And we're not gonna dive really deep into them
in this course, other than just to explain what they are.
Think of each view like a lens
into that database, that can be configured
completely independently than the others.
For example, one view, you may want to have
data from just California,
or maybe you have multiple country domains
that feed into this one account,
but you can create these views
that are gonna separate out just your
French site, for example.
In some ways, it's like you have a duplicate
data set, tracks that same site into all
coming from that one tracking code you put on.
But they can be configured completely differently.
And that goes for both the data and
for the permissions that you're gonna give users.
We'll see that in just a minute.
Now you can create up to 50 of these views,
every web property should have at least three views.
If you're gonna experiment and go down that route,
everyone should create at least these three.
So first, it's often useful to have a
main reporting view where you can do the majority
of your analysis.
This can be the current one that it creates for you.
Second, you should have test view,
where you can make some mistakes,
you can try new filters,
you can generally mess with things
and see what happens with no fear of hurting
your actual data.
So create that view that's just for testing.
Lastly, we're gonna have a raw, unfiltered view
that's just the pristine data.
No filters on it whatsoever.
It captures all the data, in that way
you can make sure at least then you
have all the data if you ever need to go back
and take a look at it.
Because remember the data that comes through this view,
if you filter, it's going to be processed
through that filter, way before it even reaches
your reporting interface.
Now what that means is you can't go back
and revert the data back to its raw form
once you've filtered it.
Because of that, it's really this best practice
to have this unfiltered view that
acts as a bit of an insurance policy
against any mistakes you might make
in your main reporting or
particularly your testing one.
You can always go back and check
that raw unfettered data.
Now, let's move into the tool and take
a quick look at how we move across
these accounts, properties and views.
Have you go up here and click on here,
we have our accounts, we have our properties,
and we have our views across here.
Now on the top, we can star a view,
we can go up here and click and it will
show us our starred views.
Now of course we only have one here.
As well as our recent, and it's a way of getting
organized if you start getting lots of these
inside of here.
If you wanna create new properties and views,
we'll look at the admin section a bit later,
but you can come over here
and create property, create views.
So we talked about creating those three views,
you could do so right here.
And lastly, we wanna talk about the search navigation here.
If you get quite a few of these in here
you can search through them
and filter that way as well.
So we're gonna come back to the admin tab here
but I wanted to give you a quick sense
of how these properties, views and accounts
all worked together.
We'll look at the admin tab in a minute
but what we're gonna do now is we're gonna
turn our attention to the data that's inside your account.