Are you drowning in Google Analytics data?

Sometimes you just want cut through the detail and get the big picture. Are visits up or down? How are sign-ups for the new whitepaper doing? Which countries are top of the conversion league table?

If you want to pull this data from Google Analytics for just one website it’s straighforward. But what if you have seperate websites for different parts of the business or localised ones serving each major European country?

If you’re following best-practice, you probably have one Google Analyics account with multiple profiles – at least one for each website. So in that 5 mins before the management meeting, when your boss wants a ‘quick’ European summary, you’re left scrambling between lots of profiles, CSV exports and spreadsheets trying to get the consolidated numbers. There is a better way: roll-up the data from multiple profiles into an ‘umbrella’ profile – a single consolidated view.

Tweak that GATC code

If you’ve been involved in the configuration of Google Analytics, you’ll have come across the Google Analytics Tracking Code or GATC. It’s that snippet of JavaScript on each of your web pages that does all the hard work of capturing the visitor data and squirting it into your Google Analytics account. Typically, the only difference between your GATC and someone elses is your unique account ID, something like UA-XXXXXXX-X where X is a digit between 0 and 9.

So to get the consolidated view you want, just create a new umbrella profile and modify your GATC like this:

var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);

document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>

try {

var firstTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”); // eg account ID for regional website profile

firstTracker._trackPageview();

var secondTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”); // eg Account ID for umbrella website profile

secondTracker._trackPageview();

} catch(err) {}</script>

The firstTracker call pushes data into the regional website profile and the secondTracker call pushes the same data into the umbrella profile.

You’ll need to create a similar GATC for each of your regional websites. In each instance use the account ID specific to that regional website profile but keep the umbrella account ID the same. That’s all there is to it!

What do you get?

What you end up with is a top-level summary of all data from your European websites plus you still have the regional profiles when you want to roll your sleeves up. Of course, you can still tell your boss that you did it the hard way…