It’s so frustrating when I get a client from a firm who has engaged in shady link building practices or content spam, but those things can eventually be fixed. What can’t be fixed is losing all of your historical analytics data because a firm sets up analytics under “their” account. I’m talking to a potential client right now who needs help diagnosing a big drop in ranking that occurred earlier this year. The trouble is, the SEO firm they hired is who provided the client with an analytics tracking code to be installed on their site, and since being fired has refused to provide any historical data. Yep – years of analytics data is gone. It’s extremely difficult to diagnose a problem from months ago that smashed their traffic. Not only that, there is no data now to compare traffic growth, user engagement improvements, seasonality, etc. Sure, we’ll have data starting yesterday, but nothing to compare it to.
If you have a website, YOU need to own all of your data. If you don’t own your data, get it right now. Never give an SEO company ownership of your account by providing them with the main username and password. You should add an SEO as a user on the account which you can later delete if you fire them without losing anything. Below are some links with instructions on how to add users to critical accounts instead of handing over ownership. Oh, and remember, NEVER send any login credentials via email!
How to add a user to your Google Analytics account without giving them complete ownership.
How to add a user to your Google Search Console account without giving them complete ownership.
How to add a user to your Google AdWords account without giving them complete ownership.
It’s your site – OWN IT!
