The answer is very simple, a website profile is exactly that, it is a profile for a website. Need more than 4 analytics goals for a website? The solution, simply create a duplicate website profile for you site.

Login to your Google Analytics account, select your analytics account where the website you are currently tracking is located. Remember that analytics accounts contain website profiles. The analytics account dashboard will then display the website profiles that are associated with the selected analytics account and it is from here that you are able to create additional website profiles, setup goal tracking and manage filters.

At the bottom of your analytics account dashboard you will see 3 options, “Add Website Profile” , “User Manager” and “Filter Manager”. The “Add Website Profile” option you will also notice can be accessed in a number of ways including links along the righthand side of the dashboard as well as in the top righthand corner of the dashboard.

Once you have selected the “Add Website Profile” you will be taken to a screen where you will need to choose between either creating a new profile for a domain (used when adding a new website to your analytics account to track) or the option to create a profile for an existing domain.

We are going to be using “add a profile for an existing domain” to create a duplicate website profile for a website you are currently tracking in Google Analytics. Fill in the details and remember to create a unique profile name for this duplicate profile that will help you differentiate between the duplicate profiles. Click Finish, and your duplicate profile has now successfully been created.

Please note as this is now a “new” profile, analytics data will only be gathered from the profile creation date. If you require historical data within this duplicate profile, ensure that you create your additional duplicate profiles when you setup your analytics account. Each profile will allow you up to 4 analytics goals per profile and you are able to have a maximum of 50 website profiles per analytics account. Creating multiple profiles for websites can be used for a number of other analytics tracking options, not just to maximise your goal tracking, but can be used in conjunction with analytics filters to track specific traffic (only want to see paid search analytics data?), subdomains and even social media data tracking. The options are limitless for their uses.

NB. When applying filters to a website profile, this will affect the data processing for that website profile. You will be unable to remove filters and see RAW data afterwards. In otherwords, once data has been processed with the filters associated with that website profile, you will be unable to reverse the filtered data. It is always a good idea to create 1 unfiltered backup website profile to refer to when in need.

Update:

Google updated goals within analytics in October 2009, now allowing up to 20 goals per profile. There are now 4 goal sets that can contain up to 4 goals each, allowing more freedom in what you may want to track as goals, from downloads through to purchases.

Google Analytics – creating multiple goals is a post from: The Pringle

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