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Properties and views in Analytics

What are properties and views

In Google Analytics, a property is a website, mobile application, or blog, etc., that is associated with a unique tracking ID. A Google Analytics account can contain one or more properties. You can create up to 50 properties for each account.

A view is a set of specifications for tracking traffic on a single domain. You can think of a view as a single set of rules for Analytics to use in processing the traffic on a domain. Analytics shows reports for one view at a time. You can create up to 25 views for each property.

You can set up multiple views for a single domain. For example, if you were setting up views to track “example.com,” you might want:

  • One view for traffic to store.example.com
  • One view for U.S. visitors
  • One view whose reports can be viewed only by certain people

Always create at least 3 views. A raw, a main and a test view.

The raw view

The first thing any GA implementation should include is two views: a working view and a ‘raw’ unaltered backup view. One day that raw view will save you from a data disaster.

The ‘raw’ unprocessed view is one in which the data has not been modified in any way when configuring the view settings or by adding filters.

You should always have such a set of data available so that you can sanity check anything else you do against a pure source. And you will also have a backup in case anything you do in your working views messes up the data.

The test view

Before rolling out new settings on your main view, test them on a junk view that you never use for analysis. This way, you’ll be able to experiment with settings as much as you want and you’ll never have to worry about corrupting your data.

Set your Test view up with the exact same settings as your main view so you can see exactly how they’ll change your real data. If the test goes well, apply the new setting to your main view. If something goes wrong, keep making changes until everything works or remove the new settings altogether.

Learning Resources