Last Updated on May 26, 2023
After the announcement of Universal Analytics being set to be a thing of the past, many marketers and advertisers are having to start preparing for the upgrade to GA4.
WHAT IS GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is what Google is calling a new property designed for the future of measurement. It will collect website and app data to assist with learning a customer journey, using event-based data rather than session-based, privacy controls such as cookieless measurement, and more.
KEY DATES ABOUT GA4
- July 1, 2023: Standard Universal Analytics (UA) properties will no longer be able to process data. However, you will be able to still look at your UA reports for a little longer after July 1, 2023. For the new data that will be coming in, it will only be able to be seen on Google Analytics 4 properties.
- January 1, 2024: Access to UA historical data will no longer be available. Google is recommending that you export all of your historical data reports prior to the start of 2024.
Seeing and hearing all of this leaves one important actionable item, upgrade to GA4 before June 30th, 2022. If you do not know where to start or need assistance implementing Google Analytics 4 our team at HAVOKwould love to help. To get started schedule a FREE consultation.
It is important to understand how powerful Google Analytics is for any business, specifically internet-based businesses that rely heavily on traffic and online conversions. Being able to look at dashboards and reports and create actionable insights is all the reasons you should need while learning more about your target market.
MIGRATING TO GA4 FROM GOOGLE UNIVERSAL ANALYTICS
Now that you understand how important it is to upgrade your Google Analytics, below is a quick checklist to ensure you didn’t miss any details. You can also find documentation for how to switch to Google Analytics 4.
- Create a Google Analytics 4 property using the setup assistant
- Create data stream(s) & Enable data collection.
- Activate Google Signals.
- Link to Google Ads, Search, Console, & Merchant Center.
- Set data collection & attribution settings.
- Map custom events.
- Migrate goals and conversions.
- Migrate audiences.
- Migrate eCommerce measurement.
- Consider channel groupings & UTM tagging.
As the last item on the list shows, something to also consider is Google has updated the way channel groupings and UTM tags are reported. This means you will have to follow a very defined approach to the way in which you’re tagging your campaigns.
Gone are the days you could enter ‘Paid Search’ into the medium portion of the UTM tag. Now you would put: Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|paid.*)$
You can learn more about UTM tagging and channel grouping with GA4, here.
