Google Analytics Set-Up for site with both http & https pages
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We have a client that migrated to https last September. The site uses canonicals pointing to the https version.
The client IT team is reluctant to put 301 redirects from the non-secure to the secure and we are not sure why they object.
We ran a screaming frog report and it is showing both URLs for the same page (http and https). The non-secure version has a canonical pointing to the secure version. For every secure page there is a non-secure version in ScreamingFrog so Google must be ignoring the canonical and still indexing the page however, when we run a site: we see that most URLs are the secure version.
At that time we did not change the Google Analytics setup option to use: "https" instead of "http" BUT GA appears to be recording data correctly. Yesterday we set up a new profile and selected "https" but our question is: Does the GAnalytics http/https version make a difference if so, what difference is it?
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The choice in the property between http / https is just to let Google know what the default page of your site is.
The links inside the tracking code are relative links - so if called on http - they'll send the data in http - if called on https - it's https they use to transfer the data. Your data is tracked in both cases.
You can force Analytics to always send the data over SSL - you find here how you can do that.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
PS The reason why you get the duplicates in Screaming Frog is because by default Screaming Frog is not respecting canonicals - you can change the default behaviour under Configuration > Spider > Advanced > Respect Canonicals. This way Screaming Frog will do the same as Google and show only the canonicalised version (in your case the https)
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