Beginning with the end in mind, suppose you have a few websites. Many companies do. You're likely to want to manage those websites separately, but you may also want to see them "together" in a roll up. So- many Google Analytics Gurus will recommend setting up ONE account with several "profiles" to see the separate websites. That's the easiest way to set things up. With a few tweaks, you can even see traffic crossing domains and referring to one another.
This can have some unintended consequences. You are also likely to want to run separate AdWords campaigns with separate line item budgets. In order to do that, you'll need at LEAST separate campaigns (because you can only control budgets at the campaign level) but ideally you may even need separate ACCOUNTS.
As of a few years ago, you can now "connect" Adwords and Analytics. that's a really nice feature- you can open analytics directly in adwords, and some other nice features present themselves as well- likely even more to come as this becomes more standard. Here's the problem:
You can't connect one Adwords account with a "profile" you can only connect an adwords account with one analytics account. To make matters even worse, some Analytics accounts are set up with an incrementing "UA" number in other words, you can set
up a new "site" under the same account and your UA structure will look something like this: UA-XXXXXX-1 then UA-XXXXXX-2 and so on. Google Analytics mixes it's metaphors on this one- and they consider these to be the same account but separate profiles- even though there are unique profile numbers assigned separately. Perhaps Danny Sullivan will add this to his list of the 25 Things I Hate About Google and this one may be on it next time.This may seem rather trivial, but it's pretty interesting the number of things that don't behave properly as a result of this. So how do you fix it? Well- that's the worst part- the only fix is to start new accounts- which of course means starting your numbers from scratch...and this is according to two separate Googlers I've spoken with about this issue. It's kinda one of those things where you need to think carefully about whether there are enough reasons to re-implement. Unfortunately, there may be more and more features only available for accounts that are connected.
If your accounts are connected, You'll get this neat option inviting you to import conversions from Google Analytics into adwords under "conversions." Only problem is, I've tested this a bunch, and it's unreliable. I'm not even allowed to try it again or my boss will get mad at me. He's convinced it's never going to work. Ironically, you can't import Adwords conversions into Google Analytics. It's just not an available feature...so you have build conversions in Adwords and goal conversions in GA...urgh.
So- be careful when setting up your new Google Analytics account and reach out to me if you need info on some of the work arounds we've developed- there out of the scope of the blog.
