The dreaded day is coming… Google recently announced that it is sunsetting Universal Analytics as of 1 July 2023, and Analytics 360 as of 1 October 2023.
What does the sunsetting mean for agencies, advertisers and users of the platform?
UA will stop processing new hits from the above mentioned dates, and all data stored on UA will be stored for no longer than a maximum of 6 months. From these dates, all UA profiles will be read-only, and only available to use for historical data purposes and analysis.
Get to know GA4…
GA4 is the evolution of Google Analytics, and the next generation of the data analysis and measurement product. It has been completely remodelled and rebuilt to serve measurement and tracking requirements as we move forward into a cookie-free internet. Unlike UA, GA4 relies on event-based data to measure and report. With the recent changes following the GDPR and IOS14 updates, the tracking landscape is changing. GA4 has been built to comply with stricter internet privacy policies—a privacy-first ethos, no longer storing users IP addresses and not reliant exclusively on cookies for measurement and tracking.
How should advertisers, businesses and/or agencies start preparing for the switch?
- Move fast and start your migration planning to GA4 in parallel to your existing UA set up. This way you’ll have well over 12 months of historical data in GA4 when UA sunsets next July
- Familiarise yourself with the platform. Too often moving platforms are an advertisers/businesses/agencies worst nightmare.
- Give yourself some time to get acquainted with GA4
- Import all goals and events out of UA and into GA4 (I’ve provided more detail below)
- Export your historical data out of UA
There is some good news and opportunities!
- GA4 has a free export to BigQuery which provides the opportunity to integrate other business data with your GA4 data
- GA4 has a few ML (machine learning) and predictive analytics features that can enhance your marketing success
- GA4 gives us the ability to create fully custom reports (not dashboards)
Now on the importation of goals and events…
UA data will cease to pass through to Google Ads from the sunset date (1st July 2023). If you are a Google Ads advertiser, and are using AI and automated bidding strategies based on imported conversion points or revenue data out of UA (or even using audiences from UA), migrate them to GA4. We can’t stress how important this is for the future success of your advertising. It is a massive change, and familiarising ourselves with a new platform is daunting. We did it with Google Ads a couple of years ago and I remember loathing the new interface—nowadays, I can’t remember life before it!