You Ask, I Answer: How Many Views in Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Kat asks, how many views do you typically have set up in Google Analytics? By the way, this question was answered asked in our uh Analytics for Marketers Slack group. If you're not a member, you should join now. It is free to join, and presumably it will be free for for quite some time. Um for clarity, a view is the smallest unit of an account in Google Analytics, right?

You have uh you have your your overall account level settings, you have your property settings, which is uh the uh a distinct web entity from a customer's perspective, and then you have a view, which is a facet of a property, it's a way of looking at a property's data. So if you have one website, you can have many views looking at that website depending on what your your business goals or your analytics goals are. Um and you can create as many views as you want. In fact, a lot of organizations have to create many views because they have more goals than a view can hold. Uh a view can hold 20 goals typically.

Uh, or there may be very distinct reasons like uh certain channel groupings that you want to make modifications to that you don't want impacting other parts of your company. So how many do you typically have? Um, I will typically have depending on the customer, up to eight different views. So there is there's two that are important uh that you need to have regardless of the company. One is your raw unfiltered global view.

If you have more than one property and the properties are uh linked in some way, meaning they're all part of your overall company. Like you have like development.ibm.com and social.ibm.com and all the the different web sites, but they are part of a family. You'd want what's called a raw unfiltered global view, where you have one Google Analytics account that is uh solely for the collection across all these different properties, and then you'll have a raw view of that. And a raw view means there's no filtering of any kind. You're you're collecting all the data as it comes in.

Yeah, bots, garbage data, random weird stuff, you name it, it goes in the one of the raw accounts. Then for each property, you have a raw unfiltered view. So, in that again, uh made up example. If you have uh you know Watson.ibm.com, that is a property within the IBM family, you would use a raw unfiltered view just to view what's happening on that property. And then this is where things get can get tangled.

Uh you will have a KPI view, which is your major business goals, and that's gonna have your standard filters on it. So as part of your analytics governance, you need to sit down with all the folks who would be impacted and say, Okay, what are the major business goals that we are tracking on our website? What are the things that have a line of sight to revenue, for example? Um, if you're B2B, that's probably gonna be some kind of contact us form, some kind of form submission. If you're B2C, that's gonna be uh depending on the type of B2C you are, it could be uh shopping cart fills, order requests, uh actual e-commerce purchases, uh, or if you're like a traditional retail uh uh store with brick and mortar, you may have a number of clicks on our driving directions page as a as a B2C goal.

Whatever it is, you're gonna have one view that has your major business goals in it. Then, depending on the size of your marketing organization, who's doing the analysis, and what statistical models you're gonna build, you may have three views for bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and top of the funnel goals. For example, when I set up uh a Google Analytics view, top of I always set up a top of funnel goal, and it's typically like uh engaged users as a goal. Now, that is not a business goal by any means. It is not a KPI for a business, but it is a KPI for awareness generation of what it's getting engaged users to our website, what gets people to come to the website, and browse more than one page.

So that's a top of a funnel goal that will inform things like public relations or advertising uh or email marketing or social media, all those top of the funnel channels, because you want to be able to build a customer journey just for awareness to figure out what's getting people to the website, right? If you work in advertising PR, uh social media, you absolutely need this because you want to be able to say, look, we're doing the job of getting people to the website. Now, what happens after that isn't our responsibility per se, right? Web design, e commerce design, flow, you name it, all the UI UX stuff, that may be out of the control of someone who works in PR or someone who works in advertising, but they they can demonstrate they got feet to the door, right? So that a top of the funnel goal view is it can be important.

Middle of the funnel would be things like sign-ups for webinars, sign-ups for email newsletters, things like that, where somebody said, I raised my hand and I I want to get communications from you. And then of course you bottom the funnel goals would be things like you know, call me, request a demo, uh shopping cart purchases, credit card swipes, whatever it is that you do on your website that is at the bottom of the funnel as far as Google Analytics can see. And you want those different goals because again, you're gonna run different statistical models on each to understand what's working for each layer of your operations funnel. I should be clear here. We know the customer journey is not a linear funnel, but from a organizational efficiency and process management, you still will have a funnel internally.

You will still have people who specialize in social media, you will still have people who specialize in in demand generation or lead generation, and as a result, you need to have those sections of the funnel delineated in your analytics. You may have a view per individual business unit. One of our customers has a social media team, and the social media team has their own KPIs, goals, you name it, and and so they have a view, and they have multiple views for different units within the company. This, by the way, is why it's important to have that uh major KPI view so that you can see the impact of business units together. You do not want to have business unit uh views without that master KPI view, or you won't be able to say, Well, here's how social is contributing to SEO.

Here's how SEO is contributing to PR, and so on and so forth. You need to have both of those. And finally, of course, you need a development or staging view, depending on uh well, no, in general, you just should have one, just so you can monkey around and and not blow things up because when you apply things like filters to your Google Analytics data, they are destructive to data and they are non-retroactive and they are non-recoverable. You cannot undo what you do with a filter. So you always want to have that testing environment to try things out.

So depending on the size of your organization, depending on all the things that go into your analytics and who's doing what, who's running what, that dictates uh how many views you have in your Google Analytics. And it is it can be a lot, and it's okay for it to be a lot. It is totally okay for it to be a lot. So uh great question. Again, if if you want questions like this answered, go join analytics for markers.

Go to trust insights.ai slash analytics for markers. Uh almost 500 people in there uh chatting about analytics for marketers. Uh as always, please leave your comments below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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