Who owns your Data?

When did you last check your Google Analytics data? 

Having access to that data is important for your business in order to know how you are performing and it’s especially important to know how you performed over time. 

This means YOU, as the business owner, need to own that data. When your Google Analytics is setup, it should be your Account, not an account set up under another business’s account.

Some of the Benefits of Google Analytics:

• Collect website data automatically
• Collect visitor demographics
• Determine where your website visitors came from
• ID top performing content/products/services
• Review visitor behavior on your website
• Setup goals
• Generate reports
• And tons more!

Google Analytics has a lot of moving parts, so most businesses have someone else set it up and handle the details. 

As the business owner, you need to make sure that the Account is setup with you having full access to your “Account” View.

Login to your Google Analytics Account at Analytics.Google.com and confirm you have access to the items in the left “Account” column shown below.

Next, Click the Admin gear icon on the bottom left and view your user permissions. You want to make sure that you have full access to “Edit, Collaborate, Read & Analyze, Manage Users”. 

What’s GA4?

When we talk about Google Analytics, we mostly refer to what’s called Universal Analytics that was launched in 2012.

To make things even MORE confusing, Google has started to roll out GA4, Google Analytics 4.  This is the new and improved Google Analytics, or so they say.

The roll out hasn’t finished, BUT I recommend you add GA4 to your website soon because you want to start collecting that historical data from your website.  When the rollout of GA4 is complete, you will be ready to go!

🔥Hot Tip: Add GA4 to your website NOW and collect data, but don’t remove Google’s Universal Analytics, you still need that while the GA4 rollout is still in process.

What’s the big deal about data?

I love following others on Twitter that talk tech.  Things online are constantly changing, adding new features, updates, etc.  Twitter’s a good place to hang out with my other techie geeks and see what’s going on. 

Yesterday I saw a tweet from my friend Corey Miller lamenting that he wasn’t able to access a client’s data.  It was a long thread and reminded me that quite a bit of what I do is technical and business owners may not understand the details.       

Remember, your business’s data is important, make sure you have access to it and can’t have that access taken away.