Exporting the History You Want to Keep

Why export at all

Historical data remains accessible for a period after the first of July and not indefinitely.

None of it transfers into the new version, which starts empty, so any comparison with the past has to come from something you saved.

That means the choice is to export now, deliberately, or to lose the ability to compare against your own history at some point.

The good news is that the useful subset is small, because you will only ever look at a handful of things.

What is actually worth keeping

• Monthly totals for four years.
• Top thirty pages, per year.
• Traffic by source, per year.
• Conversions by month.
• Top queries, from search console.
• Device split, per year.

Six reports, one afternoon, and it covers every comparison anybody has ever actually asked for. The fifth comes from a different tool that is unaffected, and is worth exporting at the same time while you are in the habit.

Monthly totals are the important one

Since they are what every future question comes back to.

Users, sessions, and pageviews by month, for as far back as you have.

That single table answers whether last year was better, whether the summer is always quiet, and whether the change in March did anything.

It is also small enough to keep in one spreadsheet tab and to read at a glance.

If you export nothing else, export this.

Set the date range to the full period and the granularity to month, then download it as a spreadsheet.

A worked example

A business exported six reports covering five years, which took about two hours including working out the date ranges.

The result was one spreadsheet with six tabs, saved in the same folder as their hosting details.

Eighteen months later, when somebody asked whether a quiet spring was unusual, the answer took four minutes.

Without it the question would have been unanswerable, since the old tool was gone and the new one had eighteen months of history.

The two hours has paid for itself several times in ordinary questions of that kind.

Nothing they exported has ever been looked at beyond those six tabs.

Export as spreadsheets, not screenshots

Since the format decides whether it is usable later.

A downloaded spreadsheet can be sorted, charted, and compared; a screenshot can only be looked at.

Most reports offer a download option that produces a spreadsheet directly, which is the one to use.

Where a report will not export cleanly, copying the table into a spreadsheet by hand is still better than an image.

Name the files with the report and the date range, since in two years nobody will remember what an untitled download contains.

Putting them all into one workbook with a tab each is better still, since a single file is harder to lose than seven.

Put it where the business keeps things

Which is the step that decides whether it survives.

Not in one person's downloads folder and not in an individual's account.

Alongside the hosting details, the domain renewal date, the redirect list, and the other records that outlast whoever is currently looking after them.

Keep a second copy somewhere else, since a single copy of an irreplaceable archive is not an archive.

This is the only chance to make it, which is what distinguishes it from every other task on the list.

Do it before the deadline, not after

Even though access continues for a while.

The interface will change, the access period is stated in general terms rather than as a firm date, and the thing everybody intends to do in August is the thing nobody does.

An afternoon in June is an afternoon; the same task attempted in a hurry next year may not be possible at all.

Treat the first of July as the deadline for this even though it technically is not.

That is the version that actually gets done.

Add your own numbers while you are there

Since the export is only half of a useful archive.

Add a tab with your monthly enquiry count, your revenue if you want it there, and a note of anything significant that happened in each year.

A site redesign, a change of supplier, a price rise, a quiet quarter with a known cause.

That context is what makes the figures readable in three years, and it exists nowhere except in somebody's memory.

Twenty minutes of writing it down now is worth more than any of the exported reports.

Check the date range actually applied

A small trap worth knowing about, since it produces an archive that looks complete and is not.

Reports default to a short recent period, and changing the range does not always carry through to the download, particularly where a report is sampled or limited.

Open each exported file and check the first and last dates before moving on, which takes seconds per file.

Also check the row count, since several reports quietly cap the number of rows exported and a table ending at exactly five hundred rows has been truncated.

Finding that in June is a minor annoyance and finding it in two years is not.

The counter-case

Most of it will never be opened.

Businesses export enormous archives and then look only at monthly totals, which is exactly why the list above is six items rather than thirty.

Very small sites also have figures too low to be meaningful historically, so the archive answers nothing anybody would have asked.

And a business that has never used its analytics has nothing worth preserving, which is worth admitting rather than exporting out of duty.

Export six reports as spreadsheets, add your own enquiry figures and a note of what happened each year, and keep a second copy somewhere else.

The afternoon

1. Export monthly totals, all years.
2. Export top pages per year.
3. Export sources per year.
4. Export conversions by month.
5. Export queries from search console.
6. Add your enquiry counts.
7. Note what happened each year.

Step seven is the one that makes the rest readable, since a table of numbers with no record of what caused them is considerably less useful than it appears.

What to do when the site itself is changing is covered in analytics for a site you are about to replace.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.