Don’t allow your new agency or website company to create a new analytics account for your website.
I have had a case recently where a long term client I have worked with for 3 or 4 years decided to go with another agency.
Thankfully they were another Google Partner (so they should know what they are doing – or so I thought).
As much as I hate losing clients, it is life and I wish them well on their new path with their new agency.
BUT
What I cannot understand is when a new agency or website company decides to create a new analytics account and install a new analytics script on the site.
So I thought I would write a blog post as to some of the downsides of having a new analytics account set up by your new agency or website design company.
1. Historic Data
One of the biggest factors in not letting your new agency install a new analytics script on your site is historic data.
If your analytics account has been recording site data for 2,3,4 or 10 years, this is all valuable information on how you have improved your marketing and how customer behaviour has changed.
How has mobile traffic to your site changed over the last three years? Is my new site performing better than my old site year on year?
These are all great questions to ask and reflect on in your historic data.
2. Annotations
One of the great features in Google Analytics is annotations. These allow you to make a note on a specific day. You can put in notes that may have impacted your business. You should make notes if:
- You launched a new marketing campaign
- Your awe-inspiring blog article was written and published
- You launched a new website
- You received media coverage from a major publication that included links to your website
- Your main competitor announced a major sale that offers 40% off all products and services
This will then allow you to correlate changes in traffic with events that have happened.
Here is an example of an annotation made on the launch of the clients new website. As you can see traffic climbs after the new website was launched.
As you can see historic data can be very useful. So why would you change your analytics account and lose this data.
Surely it is not an insidious way of the new agency not letting you actually see how well they are performing.
3. Account Settings
Correctly setting up a new analytics account is a time consuming process (unless you are doing it wrong by just slapping the analytics script on the website). There are a number of tweaks you need to make to allow data to be recorded more accurately and have more use to you and your business.
Some account settings may also need to be activated and configured, such as site search, Adwords linking and search console linking.
Additionally over time various filters have probably been added to reduce the amount of ghost spam on the site.
For most Analytic installs it can take between 2-6 hours to configure the site correctly.
4. Goals
Goals also need to be configured and setup.. If you have an ecommerce site you will need to add the additional ecommerce script to your site. If you do not however have an ecommerce site you still need to add additional tracking script to forms or downloads which you want to track as conversions.
Make Sure You Have Access To Your Account
So surely there must be a better way than just allowing your new agency or website company to set up a new analytics account and stop using the old one.
Well yes there is.
Just add them as a new user on your account.
If you would like to add a new user please give me a call and I will be more than happy to walk you through this or check out this article on How To Add A New User In Google Analytics
