How to Copy a View in Google Analytics

Duplicating a view in Google Analytics is the perfect way to test new filters or create segmented reports without putting your primary data at risk. In this post, we’ll walk you through exactly how to copy a view, explain why it's a vital skill for anyone managing analytics, and cover some smart ways to use your new views right away.

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Why Copy a View in Google Analytics?

Before diving into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Creating a new, separate view isn't just a superfluous feature, it's a fundamental best practice for keeping your analytics data organized, reliable, and secure. Once a filter permanently alters your data in a view, there's no going back. Copying a view gives you a sandbox to work in, protecting your historical data from irreversible mistakes.

Here are the most common and valuable reasons to copy a GA view:

• To Create a Testing Ground: You want to try applying a new, potentially complex filter - like excluding all traffic from a particular country or isolating traffic to a new subdomain. Instead of applying it to your main view and hoping for the best, you can copy the view and apply the filter to the duplicate. If it works as expected, great. If it breaks your data, you can simply delete the copied view with no harm done to your primary records.
• To Build Segment-Specific Reports: Reporting is often cleaner when you're only looking at the data that matters for a specific channel or audience. You can create dedicated views for distinct segments, such as:
• To Provide Limited Access to Stakeholders: Let's say you're working with a freelancer to optimize your blog content or a marketing agency focused solely on your US campaigns. You can create a "Blog Only" or "US Only" view and give them access just to that view. They'll be able to see all the data they need without having access to your company's entire analytics operation.
• To Preserve an Unfiltered Backup: This is arguably the most important reason. Every analyst should have a completely raw, unfiltered view that serves as the "source of truth." This view should have no filters, no goals, no modifications - nothing. It exists purely as a historical backup. When you need to create a new view for testing or segmentation, you always copy this raw view.

The Golden Rule: Start with an Unfiltered View

Before you copy anything, make sure you have a "Master" or "Raw Data" view in place. This will be your permanent, untouched backup of all the data your tracking code collects. It’s your safety net. If a filter on another view goes haywire and you lose crucial session data, you'll always have this raw view to fall back on for accurate historical analysis. You can’t bring back data that a filter has removed, which is why this 'do not touch' view is so important.

As a best practice, you should always create copies from this raw view, not from another view that already has filters applied. This ensures you're always starting fresh without any layered-on modifications you might forget about.

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How to Copy a View in Google Analytics (Step-by-Step)

The process itself is surprisingly straightforward and only takes a minute. Here’s a breakdown of the steps:

1. Navigate to the Admin Panel: Log in to your Google Analytics account and click on the Admin gear icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
2. Verify Your Account and Property: The Admin page is divided into three columns: Account, Property, and View. Ensure you have the correct Account and Property selected, as you might have access to several.
3. Go to View Settings: In the right-most "View" column, make sure the view you want to copy is selected in the dropdown menu at the top. This is typically your "All Web Site Data" or your designated "Raw Data" view. Once selected, click on View Settings.
4. Find the "Copy view" Button: Near the top right of the View Settings page, you'll see a blue link that says Copy view. Click it.
5. Name Your New View: A small dialog box will pop up. In the "New view name" field, give your view a clear and descriptive name that explains its purpose (e.g., "[TEST] Blog Traffic Only" or "[PROD] US Mobile Traffic").
6. Decide on User Permissions (Optional): You’ll see a checkbox that says "Copy permissions." If you check this box, everyone who had access to the original view will have the same level of access to your new view. If you leave it unchecked, only you will have access initially, and you can add other users manually later. For security and organization, it's often best to leave it unchecked and add users thoughtfully.
7. Click "Copy View”: Click the blue Copy View button to finalize the process. Google Analytics will create the duplicate, and you'll be redirected back to the Admin panel, where your new view will be selected.

That's it! Your new view now exists and will start collecting data from this moment forward.

What Gets Copied (and What Doesn't)? A Quick Look

It's important to understand what information carries over to your new view and what doesn't. Getting this wrong can lead to serious confusion down the line.

What Gets Copied:

• View Settings: Your primary settings, such as the view's name, URL, time zone, and currency display, are copied over.
• Some Configurations: Most of your core configurations, like applied filters and goals, are duplicated. However, the data associated with those goals is not. They are essentially fresh goals that will start tracking conversions from scratch.
• User Permissions (if selected): As mentioned, if you check the "Copy permissions" box, all user access levels from the original view will be mirrored in the new one.

What Does NOT Get Copied:

This is the big one: Historical data does not get copied.

Your new view is a blank slate and starts recording traffic from the exact moment of its creation. It will not contain any of the page views, sessions, users, or event data that was collected in the original view. This is the single most important limitation to remember, as it stops people from using a new view to "clean up" or retroactively analyze old data under a new set of filters.

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Four Smart Things to Do with Your New View Immediately

Creating the view is just the first step. To make it useful, you'll want to configure it for its specific purpose. Here are four best practices to follow right after you've made a copy.

1. Confirm Your Naming Convention is Clear

Disorganized naming systems are a recipe for confusion. If you have "Copy of All Web Site Data" and "Copy of Copy of All Web Site Data" in your dropdown menu, nobody will know what they're looking at. Instead, use a clear, prefix-based system. Some common and effective conventions include:

• [PROD]: For live, production views you use for regular reporting. Ex: [PROD] Main Reporting View
• [TEST]: For temporary views used to test a new filter or configuration. Ex: [TEST] Exclude UK Traffic
• [RAW]: For your unfiltered, master backup. Ex: [RAW] Master Unfiltered View
• [DEPT]: For views created for a specific department. Ex: [DEPT] Marketing Blog View

2. Apply Your Specific Filters

Now is the time to apply the filters that this view was created for. For example, if you created a view intended to show only traffic to your blog, you would navigate to Admin > View > Filters and create a new custom filter like this:

• Filter Type: Predefined
• Filter Definition: Include only > traffic to the subdirectories > that begin with
• Subdirectory: /blog/ (or whatever your blog's directory is)

This will ensure that every single report within this view only contains data related to your blog, making your content performance analysis much cleaner.

3. Exclude Internal and Bot Traffic

Unless you're copying your "RAW" view to create another backup, your new view should almost always have filters to exclude irrelevant traffic. This includes:

• Internal Traffic: Create a predefined filter to exclude traffic from the IP addresses that belong to your office, your home, and any remote employees. This stops your own team's activity from artificially inflating your website metrics.
• Known Bots and Spiders: In the "View Settings," there is a simple checkbox for "Bot Filtering." Make sure this is checked to automatically exclude hits from all known bots and spiders. This is a quick win for data hygiene.

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4. Set Up Relevant Goals

Your "Blog Only" view might have goals that aren't relevant to your main e-commerce site, and vice-versa. Use your new view to create highly specific goals. For instance, in your blog view, you could set up goals to track:

• Newsletter sign-ups from a form embedded in blog posts.
• Clicks on a "Download Ebook" link.
• Visits to the /contact page originating from the blog.

This allows you to measure the success of a specific section of your site without cluttering your master reporting view with dozens of micro-conversions.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to properly copy a view is more than just a technical exercise, it's a foundational skill for maintaining clean, trustworthy, and organized Google Analytics data. By creating dedicated views for testing filters, segmenting traffic, and providing secure access, you empower yourself and your team to explore data freely without ever risking your main source of truth.

While organizing views helps, we know that getting straight answers out of your marketing and sales data can still feel like a chore. Constantly switching between GA views, not to mention other platforms like Shopify, Google Ads, and Salesforce, takes hours away from actual analysis. At Graphed, we automate the hard parts. We connect to all your data sources so you can get real-time dashboards and reports simply by asking questions in plain English - no more clicking through endless menus or manually stitching spreadsheets together.