Website redevelopment and preserving Google Analytics

Question

I'm currently working on a project to re-develop a public sector website. The website uses Google Analytics and has done since April 2007, so alot of data has been captured.

The new site will be developed using ASP.net MVC and as part of the the redevelopment we want to make the URL's more SEO friendly by getting rid of the ?id=123 and replace it with /news/2010/01/this-is-the-title.aspx. Other pages will have different routes however the may have the same content.

I've already developed a legacy route engine which can issue a 301 and redirect the user to the new page however I am uncertain of what will happen to the Google Analytics.

I really don't want to start over with the analytics. Is there a way to join up the new url to the old url on Google Analytics?

Answer 1

I guess you could make use of the _trackPageview function to track a different page name. See How do I track AJAX applications?.

For that, you would obviously need to know programmatically the name of the old URL.

It might be less hassle to make a cut, and start a new profile from scratch with the new URLs.