Recommended Google Analytics Best-Practices
Account Configuration
Ensure that more than one person has full access permissions on the account.
It is highly recommended that you provide full access permissions to more than one person/email address. It is also a good idea to also provide full access permissions to a generic email address that is tied to your department, and not to a specific individual.
If there is only one person who has full access to the Google Analytics account, and that person becomes unreachable, your Google Analytics account will be inaccessible. Next time you need to add additional users to the account, or make other configuration changes you may find yourself unable to do so.
Property Configuration
Participate in the Mason Google Analytics Roll-Up
A roll-up property is a Google Analytics property that aggregates Google Analytics data from multiple websites. This allows you to see a broader view of web traffic across multiple websites, not just the data for a single website in isolation.
The Mason Google Analytics Roll-Up is a shared Google Analytics web tracking property which collects data from a number of George Mason University websites. There is no downside to participating; your individual Google Analytics property will still collect data just from your website. On the other hand, by participating, you will help us build a larger dataset containing information on the overall Mason web presence.
For more information about the Mason Google Analytics Roll-Up, please click here.
If you have more than one website, consider using a unit-level roll-up account.
If your unit manages multiple websites, you should strongly consider setting up a ‘roll-up’ property to aggregate the websites within your unit. For example:
Let’s assume that Mason runs 26 websites: website A through website Z. Your unit is responsible for websites A, B, and C. Ideally, each website will have its own individual Google Analytics property, so that each website manager can see just the data for their particular website. In addition, all 26 websites participate in the Mason Google Analytics Roll-Up, which means that Mason has one single property which aggregates all website activity across all Mason websites. You should also consider setting up an intermediate-level roll-up covering just the websites for your unit (websites A, B, and C).
In this way, we could see the analytics data at any level of detail: either for an individual website, an entire unit, or for the entire university.
View Configuration
Recommended view settings and filters. Coming soon.