Change Primary Domain in G Suite and Access Google Services

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I'll soon be changing my primary domain on G Suite, say from old.com to new.com.

I log into MANY Google services (e.g., Google Analytics) under old.com. After I change the G Suite primary domain, will these other Google services automatically transfer the accounts to a login under new.com?

Or when I login under new.com will it be a brand new account with all the previous info lost?

I would hope the former, since otherwise changing your primary domain would be a huge inconvenience…

There is a similar unanswered question from 5 years ago here, but G Suite has made big changes to primary domain transfers since then.

Best Answer

Since I'm doing this, I'll provide an answer to help others. I'll update as I go through the process.

Before you start

  • To be safe, I added my personal gmail as a full admin user to every service I use. This is easy to do for a lot of Google services like Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
  • Go to your Google Account page to see where you are using your account for login and other things (https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/permissions). To be safe, switch from OAuth to password login where you can. Changing your primary domain could break OAuth logins.
  • This is a good resource.

Testing

I tested out accounts with multiple domains before doing the switch. I created test@primary.com (the current primary domain) and test@secondary.com (a secondary domain). When I login to Google Analytics (GA) with test@secondary.com, it is a different GA account than the one at test@primary.com.

For another test, I created a test2@secondary.com account, sent an email, and created a GA account with that email. I then used the G Suite rename feature to rename test2@secondary.com to test2@primary.com. After renaming, (1) the test2@primary.com account had the emails from test2@secondary.com, and (2) when I logged into GA with test2@primary.com it had automatically converted the GA account I created before the rename. This is a good sign!

Changing the Primary Domain

I pulled the trigger yesterday, and it worked very well. Almost flawlessly. Here are the steps I took to change my primary domain from old.com to new.com.

  1. new.com was a domain alias of old.com To make it the primary domain, you need to remove it as an alias and add it back as a secondary domain. The only (very small) hitch is that you need to explicitly remove new.com as an alias of all your users and groups. I have just a few users so it wasn't a big deal for me. Mail sent to new.com likely stopped working for a bit, but the rest of the process was so quick that it doesn't really matter.
  2. Now, I held my breath and clicked the button to switch my primary domain to new.com. old.com became a secondary domain. This happened instantaneously.
  3. I logged in to Analytics under old.com and it still worked.
  4. I "renamed" (that's what Google calls it) users from old.com to new.com. This basically switches the accounts from one domain to the other.
  5. I then logged in to Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Google Cloud Console, and Blogger under new.com and they all worked and carried over all the info from the old.com account. This was my biggest concern so I was very pleased that this just worked!
  6. The last step is to change old.com from a secondary domain to a domain alias of new.com. This was the one flaw of the process. The groups for abuse@ and postmaster@ are stuck with old.com and I am not able to move them to new.com. Because of this, I cannot remove old.com as a secondary domain. I contacted G Suite support and they were quite helpful, and I hope to hear back from them soon.

Overall, a remarkably easy process for a fairly big change. Kudos to Google for making this so easy.

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