Google Analytics is phasing out its Universal Analytics (UA) properties from next summer in favour of GA4. You’ll need to act now as data is not being migrated or stored indefinitely.
Making every marketer in the land scream “whhhyyyy?”, Google is sunsetting its Analytics UA properties on 1 July 2023, and newer Universal Analytics 360 properties will stop tracking from 1 October 2023.
No big deal?
It IS a big deal, because, as it stands, all of those years of lovely data you have in your UA property won’t be migrated to GA4. This will obviously make comparing year-on-year performance difficult and cumbersome as it will need to be done manually or with external tech.
You’ll be able to access your previous UA data for “at least six months”.
There are some benefits, we’ll get to those in a bit, but we’re still kind of stuck at “whhhyyyy?”.
Why would they do this to us, why?
We actually know why, as frustrating as it is – it’s to better measure cross-platform, cross-device usage while preserving user privacy.
Universal Analytics was built to measure user visits first and has had many improvements over the years, but Google think it’s no longer fit for purpose in a cookie-less future, with people using different devices and platforms to access content.
Launched in October 2020, we’ve actually had a bit of time to get on board with GA4 already, although many won’t have before this dramatic announcement. We can expect to see some teething problems, with many experts considering GA4 not yet ready to take over from UA. Its full eCommerce and reporting APIs aren’t yet fully launched.
Just tell me what I need to do
If you haven’t already, we’d strongly recommend setting up a GA4 property for your Analytics account so it’s tracking data alongside your UA account from now on. To be clear, do not remove your UA tag yet – use them both.
It’s pretty straightforward to set up – you need to create the property in your account in Analytics and then either provide the code it gives you to your developer to paste into your website code, or use Google Tag Manager to carry out the process instead. It automatically creates some events that show engagement, such as link clicks, file downloads, searching, engaging with video and more. If you track form completions and particular clicks (such as email or call clicks), these will need to be set up again in Tag Manager.
If you have advertising audiences created through UA, you’ll need to recreate those in GA4.
Because UA historical data will be unavailable after 1 January 2024 (so they’re currently saying), you will want to export as much of your data as you can. Try and think of every scenario you’ll need data for so there aren’t any gaps come 2024 onwards.
Give me the good news
GA4 works across platforms, can track data across websites and apps. It measures insights using an event-based, rather than visit-based model. It looks beyond last-click attribution, meaning you get a truer view of what activities or channels are contributing to conversions. Plus, it better facilitates combining metrics and dimensions into reports.
It doesn’t work on a cookies basis, maintaining a higher level of privacy for end users.
We’re excited about this bit – change is never easy but we’ll navigate it together (read: we’ll have to as they’re giving us no option).
Faire Marketing will keep you updated as we learn more.