Switching from another tool

Move a site over from another tool, with its events, goals and history.

There’s a guide for each tool fivebar brings history over from:

From anything else, the steps are the same, without the history.

The steps

Add the site and put fivebar’s tag on every page, as Getting started says. Leave the old tag where it is for now.
Run both for a few weeks, so you can compare the same days in each.
Carry your events across. Each call to the old tool becomes a call to tally() with the same name, and every event is a goal already.
Bring the history over, so the dashboard reaches back before fivebar’s first day.
Remove the old tag.

A coding assistant can do the first and third for you: give it the guide for your tool along with the instructions.

What to expect

No two tools count quite alike, so the figures change a little at the switch. Pageviews mean the same thing everywhere, so compare those first. fivebar counts each visitor once a day, so over a range its visitors are visitor-days, not people: see Metrics.

With the tag alone, fivebar also counts links to other sites, downloads, forms sent, error pages, script errors, page speed and how far each page is read, so there’s nothing to carry across for those. See What it counts.