Properties and Accounts in Google Analytics: What They Are, and How to Use Them

You’re creating a new website that you want to integrate Google Analytics into. Should you create a new Account or a new Property?

A Google Analytics account consists of three levels: Account, Property, and Views. We’ll be focusing on Account and Property in this guide.

Account: Contains your websites or properties.

Property: A website or web app. Each property has a unique tracking ID.

When you need to add a new website in Google Analytics, should you create a new account and/or Property?

We have a saying, “When in doubt, give a new property it’s own account.”

We will look at some different use cases:

A company might want to organize its’ sites within one account rather than multiple accounts for a few reasons:

  • It’s easier to grant access to various properties by sharing at the account level.
  • This will only need to be done once. If there are multiple accounts, sharing will need to happen multiple times.
  • You can also easily adjust user permissions at the account level in one central place.

That said, depending on the company size or goals, it might be better to organize sites into different accounts:

  • If you have a new website or product that you’d like to sell to another company one day, it will be best to give that website or product its’ own account.
  • If you have a large company and multiple product teams, it might be better to have accounts for each product so it’s easier to manage each team.

When Google Analytics Properties Should be Grouped Together:

If you want to organize your properties together, or if you work in a small team, keeping things in one place might be simpler and better.

An example could be if you had:

  • website.com (a web property)
  • app.website.com (a web app property)

Since these properties are closely related, they can live within the same account.

When Google Analytics Properties should be under their own account:

If you’re a web design agency, you’ll want to make sure each client has their own account rather than making a property under your own GA account. If your client decides to move on, or if they want to take over, the client will already have their own dedicated GA account and can keep historical data. Otherwise, they’d have to create a new GA account and property and start fresh in terms of Analytics (with no historical data to compare current stats to).

In all other cases, creating a new account is better than creating a property. The reason for this is because it’s easier to transfer account ownership than it is to move a property (there are some instances where moving a property is not possible).

 

That’s it! You learned about the differences between creating an account or property for your website.

What’s next? Learn how to create a property within your account: How to Add a Property in Google Analytics.