Google Analtyics during site redesign

[WSteven]

Hi,

We will be launching a new redesign for our website. There will be new URLs and navigation and almost everything (except for static pages like about and contact) will be different.

The overwhelming opinion seems to say that it's important to keep the same Google Analytics profile. How can we compare the past URLs to the new ones if they are completely different.

Does anyone have any experience in this? Did you create any segmentation?

Thanks

[WSteven]

Amelia,

I like the content grouping idea. That's what I call thinking out of the box!

[CommT]

We redesigned two websites, moved one to a new domain... And kept the same analytics accounts for both sites. To see the same page across two urls (old and new) I use content grouping in GA. It won't let you compare one with the other, but it does show a continuation of traffic (and other metrics) for a particular piece of content.

Using page titles can work so long as they stay the same (ours didn't, so this wouldn't work for us).

To compare, you can simply use the advanced filters to filter out just the urls you wish to compare.

After a while though, you probably won't be comparing much with the old version, especially if there is no chance of you reverting back to it.

Hope this helps?

Amelia

[WSteven]

Hey Matt,

Thanks for the answer, do you think advanced segmentation would make it more clear?

[WSteven]

Interesting, I wonder if there will be anything else that you can't view in a few more months...

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi - Great question sure to get everyone thinking - I have worked on projects where it has been necessary to compare old URLs to new even though they were completely different. The one thing however that was the same was the page titles - there was data collected on the old URLs and the new URLs for this. It was easy to go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages and set the secondary dimension to page titles and click on the page title column to order by page title. This will place URLs with the same page title next to each other. You can then download in csv for further analysis/comparison. However the one thing that this relies upon is not changing your page titles....

Hope this helps!

[SEOSponge]

My company relaunched our website about 10 days ago. We kept the same Google Analytics profile and I can still see past URL's and data. I just took a peek back at June 2014.

I have noticed I am unable to go back and review site speed and user experience. It only shows reports for the new pages.

It looks to me as if it is just a matter of sorting by an past period. Just one experience!