Google Analytics Quietly Releases a New Feature – Profile Copying

Edit: It appears that Google Analytics has decided to rollback this feature. It’s unfortunate, as this was a much-needed feature. Hopefully, they will re-release this feature in the future.

I recently worked on a project that had me copy a profile 39 times. Needless to say, this was a long and arduous process. Using both Lunametric’s Goal Copy plug-in, and ROI Revolutions Profile Copy Greasemonkey script, I was able to cut down the time. But, there was still a lot of manual clicking involved (can you say RSI?)

Luckily, Google Analytics has quietly released a new feature to help with copying profiles. When creating a new profile, you can now choose to import settings from another GA profile. Not only can you copy profiles within the same account, you can even copy over profile settings from another GA account!

Using the new feature, you can easily copy over AdWords cost sources, filters, goals, scheduled emails, and users. Copying over the goals and filters are probably the most time-consuming tasks, and this feature will save you a lot of time and a lot of grief from accidentally missing out a filter, or mis-typing the goal or funnel steps.

While playing around with the new feature, there are some things to be aware of:

• The feature will not copy over the some of the main profile settings including:
  • E-commerce settings
  • Site search settings
  • The query parameter exclusion setting
• If copying across GA accounts, filters will not be copied across. This is probably because the filters are not defined in the GA account you are copying to.
• If you choose to copy over “Cost sources” or “Users” from one GA account to another, viewing or editing your newly copied profile will result in a system error. This is most likely because cost sources and users should not be shareable across GA accounts.

I’m all for this great new feature, and I hope it saves you some time and effort. Just be wary of the limitations when using it.