If you buy a website with a long history online, you’ll likely want to preserve the google analytics account history. If the previous owner can’t give you control of the account with this history, things can get a little weird. The options I’ve found so far are:
-The prior owner can just add your login to the account in analytics. This works fine, but if they only give you a read-only login, you don’t have control over this and they could delete your access at any time.
-I’ve seen an option for moving a property to a new account in my analytics account, so I have a theory that if I create a new account and give the original owner’s login full admin access to this newly created account, they might be able to move control to it. I haven’t been able to test this, and I think it might be a new feature.
-You can create a new analytics tracker in your own account and add it to the site. If combined with the first option above, you can view the old account for historical data, but also start gathering all new data in your new account. Not the best solution, but better than nothing. Here is sample code showing how to do two trackers at once – notice you have to give a tracker name to the second one, as they can’t both be the default tracker. In this example, “clientTracker” is the name given to the second one. THEN be sure to include it in the send command, by PREPENDING the tracker name + “.” to the send command. See below.
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto');
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Z', 'auto', 'clientTracker');
ga('send', 'pageview');
ga('clientTracker.send', 'pageview');