How to restore
a deleted Google Analytics account is a popular topic on the Google product
help forum. Unfortunately, the information provided is misleading and
unclear. Or so I found, after spending two very stressful days attempting to
recover one of my client’s Google Analytics accounts that I accidentaly
deleted. The good news is that it is possible to restore a deleted Google
Analytics account, and I have provided the instructions in this post.
Deleting a
Google Analytics account from everyone’s profile was surprisingly easy. I
thought I was simply removing mny customers profile form my personal Gmail
account, but in actuality, I was deleting the account completely from
everyone’s profile. Given that this is Google, the leader of the web, you would
assume a better interface with some built in fail safes. There were no
helpful pop-up warnings, or mandatory email confirmations to help prevent the
error, and once it was done there was no turning back. In my rush to fix this
disaster, I started looking for help in the most logical place I could find,
the Google Analytics Product help forum.
There were
countless threads on how to restore a deleted Google Analytics Account, and
none of them provided a solution. There is nothing you can do to
restore a deleted Google Analytics Account profile was repeated
over and over by Google volunteer moderators. Luckily, I found a wonderful
instructional post by Joel Carlo on how to restore a deleted
Google Analytics Account which saved the day.
How I restored my
client’s deleted Google Analytics account
1.
Forget about the threads, and CALL GOOGLE NOW. You can reach them at (866) 246-6453 to reach the AdWords support
team. You will need an AdWords client number, but if you don’t have one,
simply sign up for an AdWords account now,
it will still work.
2. Have the
following information ready ( or as much of it as possible ):
·
Administrator e-mail who has been on the account since the
beginning
·
Profiles that were being tracked (names of your websites
affiliated with the profile)
·
Your UA number (looks like UA-XXXXXXXX) and can be found in your
tracking code on your site.
3. Once you give
this information to the AdWords representative, you wait. The rep will contact
you via email and keep you up to date on the status of your account
retrieval. The amount of time this takes will vary, and regularity of
communications is at their discretion. Word to the wise, don’t follow up by
phone, they don’t like that and your fate is in their hands. Follow their
instructions to the letter, and with a little luck, your profile will be
restored. Turn around on this request vary from 15 minutes (which I find hard
to believe) to never, and a lot of it is at the discretion of the telephone
representative. Be nice, be patient, and be aware that this is really
your fault, so no yelling at the rep.
The rep I spoke
to, told me that if you call them within a week, it shouldn’t be a problem to
restore your data. There are no guarantees, however. It took 2 days for
my data to be restored, and the first thing I did was change the many
administrators on the account to users. We had 7 admins on the account, and it
is far too easy a mistake to make when vendors, staff, and management all
have administrative privileges. Now I don’t have to worry that should we switch
to a new SEO company, the old one won’t delete my account.
