Analytics falling off the cliff after https switch

[upnet]

We made the scary change from http to https and our Analytics are taking a 2 week nosedive. Strangely though our cPanel AWSTATS are not. Is there any possible explanation for this?

 

[Robru]

Did you made a new property in webmastertools with https:// ?

 

[upnet]

Yep

 

[Anthony Parsons]

We made the scary change from http to https and our Analytics are taking a 2 week nosedive

Yer... but what has declined specifically? Have users declined, OR, all the bad stuff sniffing around your unsecured site? I mean actual users, not the nasties cloaking themselves as users.

 

[Live Free]

@Anthony Parsons is there a way to tell?

 

[eva2000]

Google Analytics I assume ? check the browser version and profile of your visitors. Sometimes alot of your traffic are bots using old browsers which may not support your server's peferred SSL ciphers so can't visit the site.

My Centmin Mod forum's premium members get acces to custom GA Dashboards I create including ones for browser breakdowns https://community.centminmod.com/posts/25254/. Very handy to see what makes up your real traffic etc. But you can create your own GA custom Dashboards too.



So if the majority of lost traffic is to WinXP IE 8 browser sessions durations of 1-10 seconds, you know you only lost bot/crawler traffic with switch to HTTPS etc

 

[Live Free]

Somewhat on topic:

I read that Xenforo will automatically detect if you're using http or https and use the proper version of analytics. What I'm wondering is should I be changing the default property URL in GA to the https version? How will this affect my GA data?

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I read that Xenforo will automatically detect if you're using http or https and use the proper version of analytics.

Google will be doing this for you already... based on their own data, but you can setup https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite?csw=1 if you wish, just to be sure you capture everything based on the known URL patterns being used.