Add Analytics to account of someone other than the one who set it up?

Question

I have been requested to get involved with a family member's site.

To date, they have been paying an SEO outfit, which I believe has been feeding them lies and milking them for money.

I can see that all pages in the site have Google Analytics. However, the SEO outfit refuses to let us see the Analytics page, and has always just forwarded them some (presumably doctored) slideshows.

The only tracking service that lists their site is Compete, which shows a number of visitors far from what they are paying for.

I would like to add their site to my own Analytics account. I have ftp access to their server, and permission from the site owners to modify any files I want.

However, I don't want to do anything that might destroy the entire existing history of analytics data, or even that would interfere with the current SEO outfit [until I have something concrete in-hand].

Does anyone know:

• Can I add Analytics to my own account when it was originally setup by someone else?
• Will there be any negative results of attempting this?
• Any other ideas?

Thanks

Edit: Can anyone suggest a better title - I can tell mine is not good?

Answer 1

I don't know if you can add the same domain to two different Google Analytics accounts (easy enough to try, though), but you can always add another service's Javascript snippet, e.g. Woopra. Google and Woopra produced very similiar results in my experiments.

Answer 2

I've put two Google Analytics tracking codes from different accounts on the same site without issues. It may cause the site to be a tiny bit slower (as it communicates twice with Google) but it'll do nothing that would delete old data or impede collection of new data.

In short, what you're doing sounds like a good first step.

You will not, however, be able to access past data by doing this. You will be able to compare their numbers with the numbers you're getting, though, which should be valuable.

Answer 3

You may want to leave their Google Analytics tracking in place while adding your own Google Analytics tracking. In that case, your numbers should be identical to whatever is being tracked by this third party.

You'll need to set up your own account and then add in the creation of your pagetracker object and your own track page view. You don't need to recreate the entire page code. You can do it with two more lines. It would look something like:

var pageTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //EXISTING pageTracker._trackPageView();

var secondTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //YOUR TRACKING ACCOUNT secondTracker._trackPageView();