Two Google Analytics profiles for two sections of the same site

Question

I've got a website which for the most part is a portfolio, there is another section of the site mysite.com/micro-site which ranks extremely well for the chosen term / topic, and brings in lots of traffic, but actually has little to do with the core business. It was really made as a piece of content - in the same way sites like this are: http://chrome.com/campaigns/rollit

For the main site, I use 1 Google Analytics profile and set of tags, and for the micro-site I have a completely different Google Analytics profile and set of tags.

The main reason I've done this is because the traffic stats and insights for the micro-site are essentially just noise. It's nice to have the traffic but they don't help when reading Google Analytics reports, so if they were combined my reports they would be a mess.

Is there any disadvantage / negatives of doing this?

Answer 1

The disadvantage is you will never be able to combine them and view the statistics together in Google Analytics even if you wanted to.

Another way to go about it would be to use the same Analytics and set of tags but use the "profiles" feature of analytics to do separate tracking.

To make this happen you would:

• Use the "Admin" button
• Select the "Profiles" tab
• Create a "New Profile"
• Select the "Filters" tab
• Create a "New Filter"
• Define the filter as "include only traffic to the subirectories micro-site"

You could create a second profile with a filter that excluded this sub-directory if you wished. Then you could view the stats together or separately.