Question

We develop websites for clients and want to give them access to their site analytics.

Not all our clients have their own google accounts, and moreover we want a unified system where multiple people at a client organization can have access to their site’s analytics.

At first I thought I would set up an analytics account under our company’s google apps account, and add our clients as users with varying access. However, I’ve just discovered that Google Analytics works only with personal google accounts- NOT with Google Apps accounts?!

You can only access Analytics reports
using a valid Google Accounts email
address. You cannot sign in to
Analytics with an email address hosted
by Google Apps.
(See here)

That leaves us with two unappealing options:

1. Add clients as users to the Google Analytics associated with my personal google account.
2. Create personal google accounts for each client organization we want to set up with analytics.

Does anyone have a better approach to this?

Thanks–

Answer 1

Unfortunately not really — the one place where GA still falls flat is that you can’t transport data between accounts.

That said, just giving clients access to particular google analytics sites works very transparently — I don’t even think they see what the “master” account is. And, for future accounts and clients, I’d generally recommend setting them up with their own accounts. You can always make sure to give your user account administrative access to update stuff, but they can feel good that the client owns their own data.