How to Remove Users from Google Analytics

Removing someone's access to your Google Analytics is a routine but important task for keeping your business data secure. Whether an employee has left the company, a consultant's project has ended, or you're just cleaning up permissions, you need a quick and easy way to do it. This guide gives you the exact step-by-step instructions for revoking user access in both Google Analytics 4 and the older Universal Analytics (UA).

Why User Access Management is So Important

Before jumping into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Managing who has access to your website and app data isn't just an administrative chore, it’s a critical security practice. Your analytics data contains valuable insights into your customer behavior, business performance, and marketing strategies. Letting access linger for former employees or contractors can pose an unnecessary risk.

Here are the most common scenarios where you’ll need to remove users:

Employee Offboarding: This is the most frequent reason. When a team member leaves your company, removing their access to all company systems, including Google Analytics, should be a standard part of your offboarding checklist.
End of Agency or Contractor Partnerships: If you've been working with a marketing agency, a freelancer, or a developer who needed access for a specific project, it’s best practice to remove their access once the engagement is over.
Changes in Job Roles: A team member might move to a different department and no longer need access to marketing or website analytics. To follow the principle of least privilege, you should adjust their permissions accordingly.
Regular Security Audits: Conducting a quarterly or semi-annual audit of everyone with access to your GA account is a smart move. You’ll often find old email addresses or outdated permissions that can be cleaned up to tighten your data security.

Understanding User Roles and Permissions in Google Analytics

To remove a user effectively, you first need to know where their permissions were granted. Google Analytics uses a hierarchical structure:

Account → Property → View/Data Stream

A user can be given access at any of these levels. If you grant someone access at the Account level, they automatically inherit those permissions for all Properties (and Views/Data Streams) within that account. If you only want them to see data for one specific website, you would grant them access at the Property level.

Being an Administrator (or having "Manage users" permissions) at a certain level is required to add or remove other users at that same level.

Google Analytics 4 User Roles

GA4 simplified the roles to provide clearer levels of access:

Administrator: Has full control over the account or property. This is the only user role that can manage other users (add/remove/change permissions) and make administrative changes to the account.
Editor: Can edit settings within a property, such as creating goals (conversions), setting up audiences, and configuring events. They cannot manage other users.
Marketer: Can edit audiences and conversions, and view most reports. A useful role for team members running campaigns who need to make adjustments without having full editor permissions.
Analyst: Can create, edit, and share 'Explorations' and other assets within the platform. They can see all report data but cannot change settings. Ideal for data analysts who need to review performance data.
Viewer: Has read-only access. They can view reports and settings but cannot make any changes. Perfect for stakeholders who just need to check in on performance.
None: Removes all permissions for that specific resource. You'll see this if a user has access at the Account level but you want to revoke their access for a specific Property within that Account.

How to Remove a User in Google Analytics 4

If you're using the standard, current version of Google Analytics, these are the steps you'll follow. The process for removing users is similar whether you’re doing it at the Account or Property level, you just start in a slightly different place.

Removing a User at the Account Level

Use these steps if you want to completely remove a user's access from every single GA4 property associated with your account.

Log In and Navigate to Admin: Sign in to your Google Analytics account. In the bottom-left corner, click on the gear icon labeled 'Admin'.
Select the Correct Account: Make sure you have the correct account selected in the 'Account' column on the left side of the Admin panel. If you have access to multiple accounts, use the dropdown menu to choose the right one.
Open Account Access Management: In the 'Account' column, click on 'Account Access Management'. This will open a list of every user with access to the account.
Find and Select the User: Scan the user list to find the email address of the person you want to remove. User lists can be long, so you may need to scroll or use your browser's search function (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F).
Initiate Removal: To the far right of the user's email, click the three-dot menu icon (‧‧‧).
Remove Access: From the dropdown menu that appears, select 'Remove access'.
Confirm the Action: A confirmation pop-up will appear, click the red 'Remove' button to confirm. The user will be immediately removed and will no longer be able to access any part of that Google Analytics account.

Removing a User at the Property Level

Use these instructions if a user needs to retain access to some properties in your account but needs to be removed from a specific one (e.g., a contractor who only worked on one of your websites).

Navigate to Admin: Log in to Google Analytics and click the 'Admin' gear icon in the bottom-left.
Select the Right Property: In the 'Property' column (middle one), ensure the correct GA4 property is selected from the dropdown menu.
Open Property Access Management: In the 'Property' column, click on 'Property Access Management'. This shows you a list of every user with direct or inherited access to only that property.
Find the User and Remove Access: Just like with the account-level removal, find the user, click the three-dot icon (‧‧‧), and choose 'Remove access'. Confirm in the pop-up.

Important Note: If a user has Account-level permissions, you can't remove them at the Property level. They "inherit" their access from the higher level. The user list will state "Inherited from account." In this case, you must remove them from the 'Account Access Management' panel if you want to revoke their access entirely.

How to Remove a User in Universal Analytics (UA)

While Google Analytics 4 is the new standard, you may still be managing permissions on an old Universal Analytics property or referencing its historical data. The process is very similar.

Go to the Admin Panel: Log in and click the 'Admin' gear icon.
Select a Level: Account, Property, or View: Universal Analytics user management is located in each of the three columns (Account, Property, and View). Click 'User Management' in the column corresponding to the access level you want to edit.
Locate the User: In the user permissions table, find the email address you want to remove.
Click to Remove: On the far right, next to the user's permissions, click the three-dot menu icon and choose 'Remove access for this user.'
Confirm: A notification will confirm the user has been removed.

User Management Best Practices

Simply knowing how to click the "remove" button is only half the battle. Adopting good habits for managing your analytics data access will save you time and protect your business in the long run.

Conduct Regular Audits

Set a recurring calendar event — once a quarter is a good cadence — to perform a user audit. Go through the user lists for your Account and high-priority Properties and confirm that every person on that list still needs the level of access they have. You’ll be surprised how often you find old permissions that can be cleaned up.

Embrace the Principle of Least Privilege

This security principle states that you should only give users the absolute minimum permissions they need to perform their job duties. Don't make someone an Administrator if they only need to look at reports. A 'Viewer' role is much safer. This minimizes the risk of accidental changes to your configuration or settings.

Use User Groups for Larger Teams

If you're managing access for a large team or multiple agencies, using User Groups can simplify the process immensely. You can create groups like "Marketing Team" or "SEO Agency" and assign permissions to the group itself. When a new person joins the team, you just add them to the group instead of assigning permissions individually. When someone leaves, you remove them from the group, and all their access is revoked in one step.

Final Thoughts

Managing who can see your Google Analytics data is a simple but fundamental part of a healthy data governance strategy. By regularly auditing your users and promptly removing anyone who no longer needs access, you keep your valuable business intelligence secure and tidy. The steps are straightforward for both GA4 and Universal Analytics, so there's no reason to let outdated permissions linger.

As your team grows, managing permissions is a constant task, as is getting relevant insights to the right people. Sharing data often means giving out access to complex platforms or manually exporting CSVs, which isn't always ideal. With Graphed, we help solve this by allowing you to create secure, shareable dashboards from all your data sources, including Google Analytics. Your team or clients can track performance with live-updating charts, so they get the insights they need without you having to grant platform access or build manual reports every week.