Georgi GeorgievWell, it never happened to me or a client I’ve helped with Analytics, but it can certainly happen and you better know your options. What would you do if you accidently delete the wrong view, property or, even worse – account? What if a malicious person gains access or abuses access you’ve given to delete crucial business information from your Google Analytics account?
To help deal with such situations, Google has just announced the “Trash Can”. It’s accessible in the “Admin” section under “Account”. Anything you’ve deleted starting January 27-th, 2015, will show up in the Trash Can once you get the feature update in your account. You can now use this feature to restore any accidently deleted view, property or account, retrieving all your data in the process.
This data will be present there for 35 days, thus allowing you to undo any catastrophic mistakes or malicious activity you might have experienced in this time period. It’s basically a time-limited safety net.
You might want to pay extra attention now to any automated e-mail about a view/property/account deletion you get, since the difference between noticing the mistake now rather than in a month can be the difference between having the data and having to start from scratch.
We still don’t have the feature active in any if the many accounts we have access to, but Google stated it started rolling it out yesterday, so this usually means that it will be active for most users in 2-3 weeks.
About the author
Managing owner of Web Focus and creator of Analytics-toolkit.com, Georgi has over twenty years of experience in online marketing, web analytics, statistics, and design of business experiments for hundreds of websites.
He is the author of the book "Statistical Methods in Online A/B Testing", of white papers on statistical analysis of A/B tests, and has been a speaker at conferences, seminars, and courses. Georgi has been distinguished as a winner in the Data & Analytics category of the 2024 Experimentation Thought Leadership Awards.
