How to switch analytics tools without losing your history

The usual reason people stay with an analytics tool they do not like is history: "If I switch, I lose last year's numbers." Part of that is true. Most of it can be solved with an afternoon of work.

What can move and what cannot

Every analytics tool stores data in its own model, so raw visits never move cleanly from one to another. What does move is daily aggregates: visitors, pageviews and visit duration per day, and per day the top pages, sources, countries, devices and events.

That covers what most people look at when they compare periods: how many visitors came, from where, to which pages.

What does not move:

• Individual visits and paths. Funnels and segments start fresh in the new tool.
• Filters across dimensions. You can see how many visitors came from Google on 3 March, and how many visited /pricing, but not how many visitors from Google visited /pricing that day.
• Definitions. Each tool counts visits slightly differently, so bounce rate and visit duration shift by a few points at the switch.

The plan

1. Install the new tool first

Run both side by side for two weeks. You will see how the numbers of each tool relate on your site, which helps when you compare old and new periods later. Expect the visitor counts to differ: tools filter bots differently, count visits differently, and browser blockers treat them differently.

2. Rebuild your goals

Goals and conversions are configuration, not data, so they do not move with an export. List the ones you use and create them in the new tool during the overlap.

3. Export the history

Once the new tool has a few days of its own data, export from the old one. Import tools should only take the days before the new tool started recording, so no day is counted twice.

4. Keep the original export

Store the export file somewhere safe even after importing it. It is your copy, in a plain format, whatever happens to either tool.

5. Remove the old script

Then remove the old tool's script. If the old tool set cookies, review your consent banner; with a cookieless tool you may not need one for analytics, although that depends on everything else the site loads and, in Germany, on a case-by-case assessment.

Moving from Plausible to Statsdot

Plausible offers a CSV export of its daily aggregates to every customer, and Statsdot imports it directly: export in Plausible's site settings under Imports & Exports, then upload the ZIP in your Statsdot site settings. The imported days show in totals, the chart, pages, sources, countries, devices, events and goals. See Import from Plausible.

From Google Analytics, there is no import yet. Export the reports you rely on from GA4 (or keep read access to the property) and follow How to remove Google Analytics without losing data.