Modify ga.js to extend session length

[colintate]

Google analytics has a default setting of 30 minutes per session - which is fine for many, but can overinflate/affect reporting on our funnels.

We need ga.js to be modified, and the setsessioncookietimeout value to be adjusted. Suggest 3 or 7 days? (is that too much?)

See

http://www.google.com/support/analyticshelp/bin/answer.py?answer=1006241&topic=1006224

Note - from what I can see - this is a universal change, so we should expect seeing our traffic numbers to the front of site drop accordingly as we measure multiple visits as single visits.

Chris - you might want to reality-check the ga.js info I've found in case I've missed something extremely obvious.

[chrismear]

Yup, I think your reasoning is right on this.

For future reference, this issue has come up because we're building an analytics funnel around the process of a founder signing up and fully founding an organisation. Of course, this process could take several days, so we're seeing weird drop-offs and drop-ins to points in the funnel which are purely the result of the GA session timing out.

Before we go ahead with this, two other options which we've briefly discussed:

1. We leave the GA session timeout as-is, and just learn to deal with the slightly weird funnel data. Not sure yet if this really renders the funnel data useless.
2. We break apart the founding funnel into several smaller funnels, each of which is an interaction which is very likely to be completed in one ordinary session of 30 minutes.