Prior to me joining Bing Ads (Online Services Division) in Microsoft, I always worried about data confidentiality on the internet. I could not understand why websites needed information from me, who was tracking me and what personal information was deciphered by websites. Luckily, the rich experience in the Bing Ads team has given me a lot of insight on websites policy on data confidentiality and what they do with the data and why they need it.

In this blog post, I will share with you Google Analytics data confidentiality and the account administration of Google Analytics.   

Google Analytics data confidentiality

  • Data that is collected from Google Analytics is anonymous. Google does not share personally identifiable information (PII).
  • Google does not share any data with 3rd parties regardless of your sharing settings with Google.
  • Google staff may access your data with your permission. You can select sharing your data with other Google products.

        *If you select it, it will use the data to improve the products.
        *If you decide to “anonymously share with Google” Google shares the benchmarking report with you.
        *To provide a benchmarking report, it removes all PII data, combines it with similar industries and creates a report based on it.
        *If you decide to “do not share”, you will not receive a benchmarking report

  • If you decide to “do not share”, you will not receive a benchmarking report.
  • Google analytics only use first party cookies that are considered safe by most users today.
  • If a user blocks third party cookies, Google analytics is not affected by it
  • If a user blocks all cookies or uses private browsing, Google will not be able track the user
  • If a user deletes all cookies, Google will track the user as a new one and will not be able to track the conversions to a prior user
  • In general, no reporting is 100% accurate. It is better to note trends over a period of time than actual impressions

Account Administration

Click the Admin tab (right upper corner) to access the account administration including managing accounts, web properties, profile and user access.

New account creation – You can create up to 25 accounts per username but there is no limit to the number of accounts you are an administrator  

Users tab
If you want to give access to other users, click on the user tab in the account administration page.

Google Analytics account administration user tab


Administrators have access to all the roles. They can create profiles, filters, goals and users. They also have full admin access to all profiles within the account.
Users have read only access to reports and can be restricted viewing only specific profiles.

Profiles

  • A profile is a set of rules that define the data you see for a web property (e.g. www.urmilasinghal.com). Profiles allow what data is to be included in the report.
  • With the usage of profiles, you can view reports on specific domains, subdomains or on filtered data.
  • Only administrators can add new profiles.
  • Profile settings are used for general information, e-commerce settings, site search settings.

Google Analytics account administration profile

To delete a profile in Google Analytics, use Profile settings sub-tab, click delete this profile at the bottom of the page.

Deleting a profile also deletes historical data associated with it. GA is not able to recover this data should you wish to restore it in the future.

Google Analytics Deleting profile  
Has this blog post cleared certain doubts that you might have around data confidentiality? Drop me a note about it.

More about reporting data in the next blog post.

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