So why have Google done this and what does it mean for us?

The new code is far more complex than the legacy code and this is in preparation for new features that will be introduced by Google over the next year. If you stay with the old code these new features will not work.

They key change we are aware of so far if that the new code will automatically detect if a page is on a secure server.

In the past it was possible if non secure code was present on a secure page that an error message would appear informing the user that the page contains non secure items. If this was your shopping cart it is likely that many users would have been scared off at that point. With the new code this mix up can not occur which is great news.

However the bad news is that it is likely that the old code will be phased out in the next 18 months and as such there is likely to be a lot of time and effort spent by many SEM’s to get this replaced on their client sites. It will also mean for many clients extra costs involved in getting their developers to implement the new code.

As such make sure that from now on you use the new code for any new analytics set ups and possibly to prevent mass panic in the future start to slowly migrate websites from the old to the new code.