A single google analytics account for many users - possible?

Question

Is it possible to use a single google analytics account, in particular, e-commerce, for more than user? I fact, I need it to be used for as a lot of users. What I want in a nutshell is this:

The users come to my web site and provide me their e-commerce data in json or any other format somehow. I have a google analytics, so I take that e-commerce data and send to google analytics. And then show them the reports for their data from google analytics by google analytics API (I guess it's reports API?)

The question is not whether or not it is profitable, makes sense, etc. The question is, can I use my, single google analytics account to achieve what I've described above?

Answer 1

Yes you can. Since you need to keep the users apart in a way that does not allow them to look into other users data you can use a single account for up to 50 users, since this is how many data views you can have per account (view permissions can be set at account level)1. Filter the view by hostname (or whatever) to record only the current users data per view.

If you do not need the interface (i.e. if you want to query GA via the api and build custom dashboards) you can have even more - simply store in unique id per user and use that to filter the data before displaying it in a dashboard. So as far as that part of the question is concerned you are safe.

Where things probably start to fall apart is data collection. Is looks like you want to do some sort of batch processing of accumuluated e-commerce data. Since you cannot send a timestamp for a user interaction all dates within GA will be off. Plus you have data limits (I'm thinking of max interactions per minute that you can send), so your insertion process might be not very efficient. It would probably be better to create something on top of the measuremnt protocol that allows your clients to send data in realtime.

1 To make this a little clearer, you can set up 50 entities whith different access permissions. Of course every view can have as many users a you like, but they will all see the same data.