Google Analytics Spring Cleaning: Get your account ready for GDPR and remove the data you don’t need HD

It’s time for a Google Analytics spring cleaning. With GDPR about to take affect, there’s no better time to remove old, unnecessary data from your Google Analytics account. Read full post - https://goo.gl/NH6d7o Take our Free Google Analytics Course - https://goo.gl/ziM77J I just performed my own Google Analytics spring cleaning, and it felt amazing! I deleted dormant web properties, and I purged data I’ll never use. Today, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to clean up my Google Analytics accounts. Follow along, and you can learn how to do a proper Google Analytics spring cleaning. Google Analytics spring cleaning methodology Here’s the methodology I used to remove old data from my Google Analytics accounts. Keep/ Kill/ Combine This a thought process I learned from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). In this process, you write out all the projects you are working on. You keep the projects or ideas that have the best chance for success. You kill projects that are impractical or don’t fit your plans. And you combine or merge like ideas together. You can apply this same reasoning to removing old or excess Google Analytics data. Here’s the clean-up I was able to perform using this process. Google Analytics spring cleaning I deleted 14 accounts that were no longer in use. These accounts were dormant. They were collecting dust, and the only traffic in their reports looked like bot traffic. I deleted these accounts outright. I moved 20+ dormant properties to the trash can. Deleting inactive properties made my accounts easier to work in and manage. Now when I look through my account, I can quickly find the properties that are tracking the data I want to analyze. I adjusted the data retention setting of 20+ active properties to “Do not automatically expire.” Adjusting the data retention setting for over 20 web properties sounds time-consuming. But it wasn’t that bad. This task only took about 10 minutes. I was able to use the data retention pop-up to adjust my setting in these properties quickly.Data retention setting I decided to leave a handful of properties with the default data retention setting of 26 months. Not every property needs historical analysis. Ad hoc reporting, segments, table filters, etc. are not mission critical for every business. If you’re only doing broad traffic analysis, you don’t need to keep user data longer the 26 months. I combined several properties into a single account for archiving and ease of access. For years I have tracked a number of subdomains for Jeffalytics in their own accounts. Keeping this data separate became a pain. So, I took advantage of the ability to move these subdomains into the accounts of their parent domain. Now I can move between the properties that track my parent domain and subdomains quickly. I removed myself from 15 accounts I no longer wish to analyze. These accounts belonged to previous clients. It’s no longer necessary for me to access their data, and I don’t n