How to structure your Analytics account

analytics accounts offer a lot of flexibility for mapping effective measurement options to your business structure regardless of the size or complexity of your business to plan your analytics implementation start at the top with the account and work your way down through the properties and data streams if you're a small business like a game developer you only need one analytics account one property and one web data stream or one app data stream for each platform if you're a large business with multiple sites and apps you'll need more planning but the same top-down approach still applies let's

define each level of the account an analytics account is a collection of properties whose data is owned by a single legal entity and is subject to region-specific terms of service if you can centralize the data in one region create one account if the data is owned by different regional entities create an account for each region a property represents the data for one logical user base like users of an app it's also the level where analytics processes data and where you create links with other products like google ads if you plan to share an entire body

of data from one user base with linked products then create a single property otherwise create a property for each separate user base a data stream is the flow of data from a website or app to a property and the level where you can control data collection features via the sdk or the global site tag you can create a single data stream for your site or if the nature and or volume of data from each area of your site varies a lot or if you need to configure different measurement for different areas then create a separate

web data stream for each area for your app create one data stream for each combination of app package name and platform now let's look at two different examples a large ecommerce retailer and a game developer the large ecommerce retailer sells its products in multiple countries a parent company is the legal entity that owns all of the data and needs a global view of the data from all countries each country needs to isolate its own data and understand the user journey across both its website and the app while each country has its own website marketing team

and google ads account the company uses just one app available on both android and ios across all regions the marketing team for each country uses the link between google ads and analytics to create and share audiences it uses the audience it creates for bidding in google ads let's structure this analytics account you need just one analytics account since the legal ownership of the data resides with the parent company you need just one property to provide the parent company with a global view of the data from all countries for the parent company to have either a

global picture of the data or to see the data from individual countries create a data stream for each separate website this also lets each country isolate its own data additionally you'll need one firebase project for the app the firebase project is linked to the analytics property and there is one app data stream for the android version of the app and one for the ios version the combination of web and app data streams in the same property lets each country understand the user journey across the website and app each country can link its google ads account

to the single property audiences are exported from the analytics property to each google ads account making them available for bidding the second example is a game developer selling multiple titles in the play store and app store it has one global brand site and a separate marketing site for each game they need to support the collection of first-party data from the websites and apps and the use of that data to create audiences and inform media buying let's structure this analytics account you need one analytics account and one property for the global brand site with one web

data stream you also need one property for each game title's marketing site and app each property has one web data stream for the site and an app data stream for the android version of the game and an app data stream for the ios version for development purposes create one firebase project for each game and link each firebase project to the property for the related marketing site and app we hope you have a better idea of the flexibility your analytics account offers when mapping your business structure analytics lets you make the most of your data for

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