I've been fortunate enough to have some new campaigns to work on over the last few weeks, and there is always a bit of work to get everything sorted to ensure everyone at various organisations has the correct access to the information and statistics that our campaign management tool Apollo collects about websites.

However our tool doesn't replace the need to use other Website Analytics tools - it collects different information that is used by us CDM's to manage a campaign. So we will always be asking a client for access to the area that collects data about total traffic numbers, often this will be LiveStats, StatCounter or increasingly often Google Analytics.

I really like Google Analytics (although I am still not sure that I prefer the new interface compared with the old one - but maybe that will come with time) and in the past people have given me their Google Username and Password. Some flaws exist when doing it this way - I have to be honest - I forgot to sign out one day and ended up searching all day signed in as this other user. This won't have any effect on me, but it may alter slightly the personalised results that they view based in part on my search history.

The best way for me to access someone else's Google Analytics account is for the main account to give my account access to their reports. It's really easy to do and ensures that your Google Account information remains secure, which is important if for example you use the same account to run your PPC activity. Not that I am not trustworthy - I would never use this info against a client - but it is better not to take risks. I've had to tell a few people over the last few weeks how to give me access to this, so thought I should give an online guide of doing so. 

So to start, you go to Google Analytics and sign in here with your analytics account and are greeted with the following screen:

You then need to click on the "edit" link for the website that you want to share this information about - as marked above and are greeted with this screen.

This is also the area that you can configure the "goals" of the website, but in this instance what we need to do is to "add user" so that you can let someone else (i.e. Me!) view the reports of the site. Again above, I have highlighted where on the screen this link is. Once you click through here you come to the final screen we need to look at where you input the required data: 

Once you add the persons email address, first name and surname and decide on their access, all you need to do is click "Finish" and let the person know that they now have the access to this.