Running the New Analytics Alongside the Old

Set up and never opened

A great many small businesses added the newer analytics property when it appeared, on sensible advice, and have not looked at it since.

The tracking is in place, data has been arriving for months, and every actual question still gets answered in the old interface because that is where things are findable.

Which is a reasonable way to behave and produces a specific problem: when the time comes to rely on the new one, you will have a long history and no idea how to read it.

The data was only ever half the reason for running both. The other half was learning it while nothing depended on it.

Why familiarity is the harder half

Because the new system is not a redesign of the old one, it is a different way of describing what happened.

The old model thought in sessions and pageviews, with goals layered on top. The new one records events, and almost everything is an event: a page being viewed, a click, a scroll, a form submission.

That means the questions you are used to asking have different shapes, and the reports you are used to opening may not exist in the same form.

None of that is difficult, and it is unfamiliar, which is a different problem and one that only time solves.

Time spent now, while the old reports still answer everything, is considerably cheaper than time spent later.

Rebuild one report a month

The practical routine, and it is deliberately small.

Take one report you actually use in the old interface, and work out how to produce the equivalent in the new one.

Start with the simplest: visitors over time. Then where they came from. Then which pages they landed on.

Each takes perhaps twenty minutes the first time and two minutes thereafter, and by the fourth you will have stopped needing instructions.

Four reports covers most of what a small business asks, which means four months of this leaves you genuinely able to use it.

Write down where you found each one, since the interface is not always where instinct suggests.

Answer one real question in it

The variation that teaches more than rebuilding reports.

Next time you have an actual question, such as which page produced enquiries last month or whether a campaign brought anybody, answer it in the new interface first.

Then check your answer against the old one, which is the safety net that makes this comfortable.

Working from a genuine question forces you through the parts of the interface that matter to you specifically, rather than through a tour of features you will never use.

It also surfaces the gaps early: if the thing you always look at is not being recorded in the new property, you want to know that now rather than in a year.

A worked example

A business added the new property when it launched and continued reporting entirely from the old one.

Sixteen months later they had a substantial history in a system nobody could navigate.

They set a rule of one hour on the first Monday of each month, spent rebuilding a single report.

The first month produced visitors over time and took most of the hour. The second was traffic sources and took twenty minutes. By the fourth they were answering questions directly without reference to the old interface.

The useful discovery came in month two: their contact form submissions were not being recorded as anything in the new property, because nobody had configured it.

Sixteen months of traffic data and no record of the only thing that mattered, which was worth finding in an hour rather than under pressure.

Which one to report from meanwhile

The old one, until you are confident, and there is no prize for switching early.

Anything going to a client, an accountant, or a bank should come from the system you can explain, and consistency across a year matters more than modernity.

Where you report to somebody regularly, keep using the familiar figures and start including one number from the new property alongside them.

That introduces the change gradually and gives you a reason to check the new figure each month.

Switch the reporting entirely when you can answer a follow-up question without going back to the old interface, which is the honest test of readiness.

The numbers will not match

Worth expecting, so it does not become a reason to distrust the new one.

The two systems count differently: what constitutes a visit, how sessions are grouped, how a returning visitor is identified, and how much is filtered.

A difference of a meaningful percentage between them is normal rather than an error, and chasing exact agreement is a waste of an afternoon.

What matters is that each is internally consistent, so trends within one system are comparable over time.

Compare within a system, never across two, and note the discrepancy once so nobody rediscovers it every month.

Check it is actually collecting

The check worth doing before any of the above, since a property nobody opens is a property nobody has verified.

Open the real-time view and load your own site on a phone. If you do not appear, the tracking is not working and the history you believe you are accumulating does not exist.

That happens more often than expected: a code snippet removed during a redesign, a plugin replaced, or a tag configured on the homepage only.

Also check that it is recording on interior pages rather than just the homepage, by loading a service page and watching.

Five minutes, and it validates every assumption underneath the rest of this.

The counter-case

There is a version of this that wastes time.

A business whose real problem is that nobody acts on any analytics at all will not be helped by becoming fluent in a second system, and would be better off counting enquiries and asking customers how they found them.

Learning an interface is also not urgent for anybody who looks at their figures once a year, since a single annual session can be spent working it out then.

And there is no benefit in becoming expert in features a small business will never use, which is most of what any tour will show you.

Four reports and one real question is the whole of what is needed. Anything beyond that is optional.

The routine

1. Confirm it is actually collecting, on interior pages.
2. Check your form submissions are being recorded.
3. Rebuild one report a month.
4. Start with visitors, sources, and landing pages.
5. Answer one real question there first.
6. Keep reporting from the old one meanwhile.
7. Expect the numbers to differ and stop comparing them.

Step two is the one that finds a year of data with the important part missing, and it takes five minutes.

Setting the second property up is covered in running both analytics at once.

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.