Problem:

I had some problems recently with my Google Analytics account not gathering data from one of my websites, though the tracking code seemed all right. I’ve even checked for possible conflicts with 3rd party scripts, but to no avail. I thought I would recreate the account. In fact it helped, but I was left with a cluttered Google profile as I couldn’t find any mean to delete the old one (and I have my websites held in separate accounts).

Solution:

A quick look into the Google Analytics Help Center revealed it’s not that straightforward, but possible. Just check those articles: “How do I delete my Analytics account?“or “I would like to cancel my Google Analytics account“. It seems you can disable tracking and then file a removal request to the Google support team. Lazy as I am at times, I wanted some instant fix without the burden of contacting Google on such a trifling matter. You could say I should just remove my profile from the users in the Access Manager, but being the only administrator would involve transferring the account to some bogus profile, which is just an unnecessary waste of time.

Workaround:

For the time being it looks like changing the account’s name to [DISABLED]example.com does the job. Dirty, but quick. Google appears to load the first account in lexicographical order as default. Till the moment it gets too messy, I can live with that. And maybe then will I try hounding the poor guys from Google.

Update:

As of July Google changed the lexicographical order processing. No longer do [DISABLED] tags work as desired. All non alphanumeric characters seem to be sorted in precedence. So the way to go now is either prefixing good accounts with some dots or the like (f.e. [A]example.com for active, [D]example.com for old accounts) or adding some ‘ZZZ’ prefixes to the undesired accounts’ names.

2nd update:

This issue has finally been fixed by Google team.