Improve support for "Moving Analytics" properties for non Site Kit placed GA snippets

[jamesozzie]

Bug Description

For non Site Kit placed Analytics snippets the plugin will auto populate and registered the correct Google Analytics account and property. If a user moves the inserted property to another one of their GA accounts, from their Analytics settings (on the Analytics Web UI) they'll encounter the below notice when visiting their Analytics settings screen within SK:

Error: We've detected there's already an existing Analytics tag on your site (ID UA-200017903-1), but your account doesn't seem to have access to this Analytics property. You can either remove the existing tag and connect to a different account, or request access to this property from your team.

The user may already have access to that property, it's just in a different Google Analytics account to that which SK initially connected to. In this case the notice could be improved, or the plugin could handle these moves better.

Steps to reproduce

1. Insert a Google Analytics snippet manually or via a third party plugin. I used the GA Analytics plugin as per the impacted user during testing.
2. Connect the Analytics module, the plugin will pre populate and use that non SK placed snippet
3. Move that property from within the Analytics platform, to another Analytics account which you are an administrator of
4. Revisit the Analytics settings with Site Kit
5. An error is encountered, as the plugin remains connected to the initial GA account

Screenshots

Possible fixes

I see two possible solutions.

1. Textual change: Improve the wording on the notice encountered

+ but your Google account or the connected Analytics account
- but your Google account

2. Perform a check each time the Analytics settings are visited. The check should be for not just the property, but also the containing Google Analytics account. If the property now belongs to a different GA account the plugin should register this new GA account alongside the property, and display this in the account dropdown field.

Additional Context

• Support topic where this came up
• Internal testing with further details
• Recording of experience
• For SK placed snippets the experience is much improved, with the warning more appropriate and the user being able to change the connected GA account and property when revisiting the SK Analytics settings.

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Acceptance criteria

Implementation Brief

Test Coverage

QA Brief

Changelog entry

[jamesozzie]

As a side note changing the wording isn't an ideal solution. If a user disconnects the Analytics module with Site Kit or even resets the plugin upon reconnecting once more they're stuck in a loop, as the plugin shows the warning each time.

Recording of experience after disconnecting.

The only workaround at present is to remove the non Site Kit placed snippet.

[aaemnnosttv]

Thanks @jamesozzie – this sounds like a bit of an edge case but I agree this could lead to an odd experience. With the changes coming to the behavior around existing tags, the user wouldn't be blocked any more as a result of this change but there may be something we can do to ensure the account ID is updated properly.

[aaemnnosttv]

We'll revisit this after the Existing Tag Simplification (#4448) issues are done.

[aaemnnosttv]

@kuasha420 let's look into this to see if the same is possible in GA4 and then we will have a better idea if this is worth addressing or not.

[kuasha420]

@aaemnnosttv I have verified that it is possible to move GA4 properties across accounts.

After doing that, the Settings page doesn't show an error but the GA4 property vanishes from the selection and dropdown. It's still shows up in the Settings View.

So something worth moving forward. Moving this one to AC for further investigation.