Why is it better to create multiple views for Website Analytics

If you are a blogger or a website owner then you must be aware of Website Analytics using Google Analytics. Most of the users who have registered with Analytics just register and forget about it. Not many people take time in understanding the reports. It's very important to understand these Website Analytics reports in order to understand visitors behavior and also to improve the overall user experience and quality traffic to your website. One of the key things in Google Analytics is the properties and views under each of the property.

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In Google Analytics, you can create multiple view for each of the property. In order to define each view, you can use the configuration settings in your account. Multiple views are created to protect and manage your data. Say, I have a sales team for my car company in  3 different regions - India, US and UK. I will create a view for each of these regions so that my sales team can access only the data related to their region provided I give the right access to each of these sales team to see the views. By doing so my sales team will not have to bother about all the other data from other geographical regions and concentrate on their specific region.

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As shown below, for each property you can have multiple views (as discussed in the above example) or for each of these regions you can have a master view, test view and a unfiltered view. Note that property is created by default and it will contain all the data which by default is the unfiltered data. Do not touch this data when you experiment with different filters or other experiments that you do on data and consider the unfiltered data as the backup data. All new experiments that you do on data or changes to the existing data settings, should be done on test view. Once you are OK with the data settings and changes, apply this change from test to master view. Master view is the final view which has the data using which you understand and analyse.

The main reason why multiple views are always better than having and experimenting data on single unfiltered view is - once Google Analytics processes data from your blog or website or app, the data can never be modified or changed or reprocessed. So, be careful when you update the settings else the reports that are generated might have inaccurate data. Deleting a view means it's gone for ever and hence having a backup or the unfiltered view is always good. Note that when you create a view all the data reports that you see will be from the day you create the view and not the historic data.

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This structure of properties and views while doing website analytics is one of the best practices to follow and is recommended by Google Analytics for you to achieve your long term measurement goals. If something goes wrong with the test view or master view you can always create a duplicate of Unfiltered view.

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