Why do some data analysis experts recommend having two Google Analytics accounts?

Question

I read some articles about data-analysis and they recommend 2 Google Analytics accounts for better tracking. I don't have the clue why they would recommend that.

Answer 1

There are probably some reasons why you might want to send pageview trackers to multiple Analytics accounts, though having multiple analytics accounts isn't at all necessary and I use just one.

You can have the analytics code send a pageview to two tracker IDs. The .js code required is only loaded once, and the sent view doesn't take up much bandwidth on the client's end nor should it slow down page load time.

You can have an analytics account that tracks all of your websites. Simply put that analytics id into all of your site's analytics tracking code and you can view the pageview counts for all of your sites each day and in real time with one simple analytics tab. You can also add in a tracking id code for individual sites so that you can jump to that site in analytics and view the stats for that individual site.

A person might also want different analytics tracking code if they've heavily modified their analytics data with different customizations and events, and still want to have an analytics account that shows the default information as well.

This is also useful if you want a tracking code on some pages but not all of your pages and you want to easily access that part of your site. So you can have a tracking code for example.com/*, example.com/category/, example.com/news, etc. This could be valuable if you want to be able to share the analytics for your example.com/news with other email addresses but don't want them to have access to all of your example.com analytics.

I'm sure there's some other reasons why someone might want multiple analytics accounts on one webpage. Most of it has to do with being a real stats junky. One analytics tracking id will do the job unless you have specific reasons for why more than one is useful to you.

Answer 2

The only reason that come to my mind is the limit of properties per account.

Each Analytics account can have up to 50 properties and each property can have up to 25 views. Contact your support representative if you need more properties or views.

In any other case, sending the same data to more than one account is a waste of time and resources cause you can achieve the same result with properties.

Answer 3

There is no technical logic behind that about 2 GA accounts.

It only for to check the site performance. with and without filters like as- counting your hits and in another account excluding your hits to measure the real improvements from your SEO and other efforts. (it is only a simple example to understand)

I found this answer from Google during Partnership.

Answer 4

Do you mean profiles?

As has been said above there is no sense in having multiple accounts, but it is best practice to have multiple profiles including one which you never touch (no filters or anything) so it contains data which hasn't been processed in any way. The reason this is done is in case of data loss.

Good luck, more information here:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1102152?hl=en http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/best-practices-for-google-analytics-profiles/