Analytics year to year comparisons when Url extensions change?

[Teamzig]

We manage a website which we recently changed from Drupal to Word Press. In the change, we dropped a small part of the previous URLs - the end extension - .php For example /attractions-rates.php is now
/attractions-rates with no .php. We eliminated the .php to make the URL simpler.

How is it possible (and easiest) to do a year to year comparison as Google sees the pages as different? They didn't for the first 8 days (we could see both) but now the pages with the .php extension shows zeros.

The content of the page is exactly the same only the .php is different. We know we can manually go back to last year's reports and do side by side but that is time consuming. Hoping there is a filter or process we can use to gen a report? Thanks, Jim

[TrentonGreener]

Hello Jim,

I understand that comparing these two data sets can be rather frustrating, especially when you're trying to do quick comparisons across multiple data sets.

Unfortunately, there is no way to retroactively filter this data within the Google Analytics reports. But you can create a filter to handle this issue moving forward. 
To do this, go to the specific view that you wish to change this data in, select the 'Filters' option and then select 'Create new Filter'. Then after naming it as you please, choose 'Custom' as your Filter Type and then select the 'Search and Replace' radial option. Under the Filter Field drop-down, select 'Request URI' and in your Search String enter '.php$' and leave the Replace String section empty. (This is a regular expression; therefore, the beginning \ escapes the '.' variable & the '$' defines that this should only happen when the string ends in '.php')
Then at the bottom of the page you should see an option to verify this filter. Do so and ensure the change being made makes your desired effect. Be sure to check that no anomalies are created through this process.

Now that you have created a filter to handle this issue moving forward, the best way to handle this is to manually export the data and sort the URLs by alphabetical order, unless you are fluent in using the Google Analytics API. Then you could use the API to pull this data into Google Sheets & have it automatically clean up the data, but I would not recommend this solution if you haven't previously used the Analytics API.

While I know this is not an ideal solution, this should handle the issue moving forward.

Let me know if you have any further questions!

Regards,
Trenton