How to move a website profile to another Google Analytics account

So I thought that since it’s a new year, I should clean up things around here. One of the personal tasks that I totally neglected in 2012 is managing my Google Analytics (GA) account. I had a number of websites that were using Google Analytics and I had spread them across three different accounts within the same Google Analytics account. I logged on to my GA account today and thought I should delete profiles of websites that are now dead (yes, those that got hit by the Panda, Penguin updates — no idea why they got hit) and consolidate the remaining ones into a single account for ease of management. I couldn’t find a way to move website profiles around. Apparently, Google does not support moving a website profile from one GA account to another. Let me say that again. There is no way to move a website profile from one Google Analytics account to another. Imagine that.

There have been several discussions on the Google product forums and it’s evident that a high number of Google Analytics users are clamoring for this feature — the ability to move website profiles from one account to another. This is not even across different Google Analytics accounts — we’re talking about the same Analytics account.

Join the masses

Here are some of the threads. Feel free to join in if you want.

• http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/Vrmt0cnLB2s[126-150-false]
• http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/aZjZqyL6qA4
• http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/25582/how-do-i-move-websites-from-one-profile-to-another-in-google-analytics
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6278914/can-we-move-google-analytics-data-to-other-account

So, what to do then?

Currently, the only way to move an existing website profile to another account (within the same Google Analytics account) is to:

1. Delete the website profile. See caveat below before you do this.
2. Recreate the website profile under the account to which you wanted to move the website profile.

One caveat — doing this will delete all of your existing website profile data. All the website statistics (visits, traffic, sources, etc.) that you had in that profile will be deleted. If you want to have a record of the website’s past statistics, I recommend exporting the website profile data before deleting the profile.

Oh, and happy new year, by the way.