I run 4 separate business so I use 4 Google Analytics accounts.
300 web-sites in single Google Analytics account
In ONE of the business, we plan to roll-out about 300 websites, with about 10 engines, and each engine feeding about 30 websites. There is a Google Analytics "account" for this business and will contain the 300 sites inside.
Say, as a "small example" that we talk about 3 engines and 3 sites per engine, this could be our final setup:
- Forums engine:
- Forum about drink water quality
- Forum about trees, plants and flowers
- Forum about maintaining machinery in factories
- Informational engine:
- How to select the best dishes and glasses for home
- How to select the best pens and markers for offices
- How to select the best doors and windows for industries
- Statistics engine:
- Statistics about kids education per spanish-speaking countries.
- Statistics about diseases in Canada per age-range.
- Statistics about usage of radio and television on countryside areas.
What I've found so far
Every single article about configuration of Google Analytics I find suggests to put "each web site" in a "Property" under the Google Analytics account.
But each engine makes all its child sites to behave similar with similar user-flow goals. Although the URIs of ones or the others can vary, like for example the dishes and the pens sites could have different URLs like these:
https://dishes-and-plates-example.com/the-20-most-popular-glass-combinations
https://pens-and-markers-sample-site.org/how-markers-ink-can-damage-your-table
There are also common similarities like same URL paths for all of the siblings of a certain engine, like for example a brands (by brand)
or a where to buy (by country)
for the informational sites, or a drill-down (by axis and value)
for the statistics:
# Informational sample common path "brands" by brand
https://dishes-and-plates-example.com/brands/villeroy-boch
https://pens-and-markers-sample-site.org/brands/stabilo
# Informational sample common path "where to buy" by country
https://dishes-and-plates-example.com/where-to-buy/colombia
https://pens-and-markers-sample-site.store/where-to-buy/canada
# Statistics sample common path "drill down" by analysis axis and value
https://kids-education-example.info/drill-down/subject/mathematics
https://radio-television-consumption-sample.org/drill-down/time-range/9am-12am
In the reality there will be about 10 engines with about 30 sites per engine totalizing about 300 sites.
Note that neither the brands
nor the where-to-buy
paths are part of neither the forums engine nor the statistics engine. Instead the statistics engine has the drill-down
path common to all the sibling sites but that path does not belong neither to the forums site or the informational sites.
Put the other side: All the sister-sites run from the same engine are "similar" although they live in different domains; while they are very different from the sites generated with other engines.
Property per engine?
The inctuition tells me that placing a single site per property, ie: 300 properties under a single account does not make sense. Specially because we might be interested in looking at "all the forums" as an overall, or "all the statistic sites" as an overall.
This "suggests me" that maybe I should setup the Property to be the "engine" and then use "Views" te filter data in function of the website domain.
This is:
- Property => Forums
- View all
- View forum site 1
- View froum site 2
- ...
- Property => Statistics
- View all
- View statistics site 1
- View statistics site 2
- ...
Final note
I'll use the new "Google Analytics 4" for all of them, as this is a new deploy. The final goal is use analytics for SEO-positioning all the 300 sites.
Question
Can you help me find, please, official documentation where it is said if this is a good practice or not?
I mean, I'm not seeking for open answers of "you can do it like this, or like that, up to you", I already know I can do it both ways. I'm more seeking sources to validate if my inctuition is correct or incorrect: Formal documentation either from google or from other knowledgeable users that specifically say that this is a correct use case or clear advise to not do this approach for this or that techcnical reason.