Google Analytics, new property or views?

[mde911]

Hi All

We have an existing Google analytics account which was customised relatively heavily a few years back, with custom variables, e-commerce tracking and the a large number of filters.

We have determined that the custom variables and e-commerce tracking, at least for now, are no longer required and actually complicating our lives. We want to simplify the account and add a fresh set of goals and events.

Our initial train of thought was to create an entire new property with the usual views, raw, test, main etc. We are proposing to retain both properties (6 months) so we can still do some comparative stuff.

We're now wondering if we should retain the existing property and just create new views, the downside being that whilst we can compare data with previous periods it's meaningless to some degree as the filters etc are different. The plus of more views is that we're not firing the tag twice retaining two properties.

Views and opinions welcome.

Thanks

[DonnaDuncan]

I concur with Ryan. Personally, I would not want to give up that history and would avoid multiple properties. I'm wondering if you could, with a little forethought and planning, group content to enable meaningful comparisons after you do the switchover.

Here's a link to a recently published (Jan 2015) guide to over 150 Google Analytics resources that I've found helpful.

[RyanPurkey]

I'd avoid multiple properties for the same property (the website) for the points you outlined above.  A new view would allow the previous time comparisons, and could probably be made to be less meaningless by applying and removing a few segments that end up doing similar things as your filters.