It had to happen sooner or later, one of my Google Analytic accounts has reached the limit of 50 domains!

Yes I know I didn’t realise that there was a limit either. Now I can’t add anymore domains to the current setup.

It’s not a big limitation as I can split up the domains by client and create new accounts for each.

When I say account I don’t mean register a new email, Google is confusing about this; you have an account that you login to, but with analytics you have accounts within that account (you can also have other peoples accounts on there and view them as an admin or read only) I can see why they call them accounts but most of the time people would use them to group their domains. Maybe it should be “external accounts and groups” or that might too much too.

Anyway I wish I had discovered this when I set the accounts up in the first place as I would have structured everything by client. I can do that now but the old data will have to rest under that old sub-account as it cannot be3 moved.

So it will look something like this:

My Main Google account (the one I use for email etc.)

Client 1 - Main domain sub account

Client 1 - 2nd domain

Client 1 - 3rd domain

Client 1 - filtered content

Client 2 - Main domain sub account

.

.

.

Client 3 - Main domain sub account

.

.

Client 4 - Main domain sub account

And so on…

That would have been a lot tidier then the 1 big account and if I had known the 50 limit I would have done that from the start.

A friend told me (not seen any evidence yet) that there is a 100 limit on sub-accounts so that makes 100×50= 5000 domains I guess that’s generous for free and you can always use another email to create a brand new account.

See you later.

Cheers

Dave

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The other day someone asked me an interesting question about Google analytics:

how is average time on site calculated? And if I go on a site and leave it open for several hours won’t that skew the average results?

That is a good question I didn’t know the answer but I knew Google would have a way to avoid this.

Well I’ve done some research and I can now explain how Google Analytics calculates the average time spent on a site. When a visitor first enters a site and goes from one page to another the time on the site is calculated by the elapsed time from the first page to the next (each page visit has a timestamp)

But if a visitor leaves the page open with no activity for a predetermined time (consensus of opinion seems to say this is upto 1 hour or so, but could be a lot less) then the that visitor is marked as an exit and the time spent on the last page is = 0.

This avoids the problems we were talking about leaving the page open and skewing the average. If the visitor then recommences surfing the site several hours later it is recorded as a return.

All bounces are excluded in the average time calculations, again because they would skew the average result.

Google will take the total time on the site and divide by the number of visitors to give the average time spent on the site.

I hope my explanation makes sense?

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