I have rebuilt the company website, with this site comes our e-commerce site, which is actually an entirely different site (due to the fact it’s linked to our POS system’s db). In condition of this, I’ve created the e-commerce site to look like the new site and they are linked together.
Having two sites isn’t a problem, my question would whether or not I should have separate analytic’s for both or just have one, as the sites are linked together.
I keep thinking two as they have different domains names (due to the POS system). I would like to see where the traffic is going in the e-commerce site, as well as the new site.
I’m just curious as to what other developers think, what you propose?
Also on another note, when I transfer over my new site, to the original domain, there is already analytics attached to the existing site, can I use the current analytics, or would it be best to start from scratch with the new updated site?
I’d argue two properties, because it makes them a bit more portable. And with separate domains that makes more sense anyway - if they’re completely separate (not subs) then you really need to anyway. You can always merge some statistics together if you need, it’d be a bit more difficult to separate them. What if you later replaced part of the store or the main site, or redeveloped either entirely? This would make them more modular to handle that sort of thing and not realize an impact from one onto the other so directly.
Existing analytics… if you don’t mind the old data, why not? If you want a clean slate, then that’s your answer though.
I’ve dealt with this a few times. I ended up keeping the Analytics profiles separate, but exporting most of the data during weekly reporting and combining it in one Excel (or, now, Google Drive) document. That’s the best of both worlds — each site has an individual record of historical traffic, but I can also get a good overview of both sites.
You can use cross-domain tracking to see how traffic from one property behaves on the other.