What You Need to Know About Transitioning to Google Analytics 4

As Google sunsets its current version of Google Analytics, the release of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will bring big changes for businesses big and small. If you’re currently using Google Analytics – easily the world’s most popular web analytics service – it’s important that you understand how your business will be affected by the transition.

Read below for a quick history of the technology before delving into the switch to bigger and better things.

A Brief History of Google Analytics

Since Google acquired Urchin in 2005 and repackaged it as Google Analytics, the world of online analysis has developed in leaps and bounds. Google Analytics was officially born in 2007 as the second release of the original technology, with multiple updates improving data collection and site speeds in the years following. This came to be known as Classic Google Analytics

A third release (Google Analytics 3) was opened to the public in 2013 to encourage its use among large enterprises. Then, in 2014, “Universal Google Analytics” was released from its beta form and all-comers were given access to all of the features Google had been perfecting over the previous 9 years. 

The next major update came in 2017 when Google released the global site tag (gtag.js) code. This allowed users to collate data from multiple Google services using the same tagging frameworks.

Which brings us to the present day…

Google Analytics 4

With universal sadness, Universal Analytics will be sunsetted over the first half of 2023 and all Universal properties will cease from July 1. But that sadness will be swiftly replaced by GA4, bringing new benefits such as improved ROI, better customer overviews, and streamlined integration with other Google services and across your enterprise.

The update was designed to combine insights from both web and application platforms, tracking customer journeys rather than simple traffic figures seen in Universal Analytics. 

At the heart of the update comes a renewed focus on privacy, in line with ever-evolving laws to put more power and confidence back in consumers’ hands. IP addresses will no longer be stored, and cookieless measurement will deliver an “event-based data model” for “user-centric measurement.”

Google has recognized that the outgoing era of online measurement was becoming “obsolete,” as it was designed for a world of desktop users and independent sessions. Since all accounts of recent years indicate that mobile devices have overtaken desktops, Google has decided to move with the times. 

For businesses, to continue using Universal Analytics would be like measuring a skyscraper with a measuring tape as laser technology gathers dust!

The sky’s the limit and Google has given us a rocket ship.

What Else Is Changing?

Broadly speaking, GA4 allows you to report on desktop and applications behavior. More specifically, there’s a host of new powers for you to wield:

New Dashboard

Some people don’t like change and they might take a while to settle into this new-look display. As with any major update, things have moved, some features have been removed, and some new features will take a moment of understanding. To the change-averse we say, trust that the old has made way for the better.

Google’s guide on GA4 will walk you through how each section works and you’ll soon be mastering every function GA4 can throw at you.

Measurements → Events

Where traffic was your major metric in Universal Analytics, GA4 gives you an array of “events” such as engaged sessions, engagement rate, and engagement time. You can gain a fuller understanding of your customers’ journey to, on, and from your site and application. Attribution, demographics, events and more will all be important metrics to get your head around come mid-2023. 

Predictive Insights

Universal Analytics was all reactive insights – snore. With GA4, you can peek into the future and use predictive metrics such as purchase probability, churn probability, and revenue prediction to tailor different content for different audiences. 

We believe this feature alone makes the whole update worth it, as your online investments will be far more effective.

Cross-platform User ID

GA4 allows you to manually attribute a User ID to individual users based on something like an email address. Once the user is in your database, you can track their behavior across sessions, devices and platforms.

This feature allows you to compare users who are signed in with those who are not, track user exploration, and create remarketing opportunities. 

What’s Next?

Before Universal Analytics stops processing on July 1, 2023, it’s imperative that you move over to GA4 to continue making the most of your website measurement data. 

Google details the three ways you can set-up GA4, depending on how your site is currently run. Check these out and begin to find your way around the platform before Universal becomes totally obsolete. 

It’s very important to note that Universal Analytics data will be deleted by the end of 2023, so be sure to take stock of the data you have and document this elsewhere if required. 

Unfortunately, Google has not included any kind of migration function between Universal Analytics and GA4, leaving users to find their own workaround. 

We recommend making the transition as soon as possible to avoid rushing a potentially massive migration at the last minute. This puts you at risk of missing out on important data and therefore losing some key marketing insights.