I currently run a small web-app that connects local businesses with new customers in a very specific niche. In the past few months this model has worked very well and the growth is excellent, so much so in fact that I'm preparing to expand the app to support multiple sites/niches. Ultimately it will be structured very similarly to StackExchange in that each site will have it's own domain, design and focus, but running off of the same platform.
With that said, I've been trying to think of the best way to handle the analytics (specifically Google Analytics) for this setup.
My two requirements are basically that I want to be able to see aggregate statistics for all sites so that I can get an overview of how the system is performing generally on a day-to-day basis, but also be able to narrow down to specific site and track at that level for SEO, marketing, and debugging purposes.
What I'm hoping is that other people who may have done this or have more experience with Google Analytics may be able to tell me whether I would be better off creating one multi-domain analytics profile (and figuring out how to break it out by site) or creating a profile for each site and having the unique profile id configured with the sites in my system.
From a development standpoint I would much rather do the former.
Thank you in advance for your time and insights!