Harriet Easterbrook
Digital Account Manager
6 min read
18 | 10 | 2022
Is Your Business Ready for GA4?
It is estimated that Google Analytics is used by approximately 55.49% of all websites. Given that Google Analytics is one of the most popular website analytics tools, the fast-approaching shift from Google's Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is something that all businesses should be aware of and start preparing for as soon as possible.
What Is GA4?
Google recently announced that Universal Analytics will stop processing data by July 2023. Signifying the end of the longstanding platform, and the beginning of its replacement - GA4.
GA4 was first released 2 years ago, in October 2020. It is the fourth version of Google Analytics and will soon be the only property available to track and measure your website data. GA4 is designed to operate across multiple platforms and devices, with user data privacy at its core – a result of recent GDPR and Schrems II rulings.
What Does This Mean for Me?
If you do not migrate your website analytics to GA4 soon, your business could potentially lose its recorded data by the end of 2023. As all data will become read-only until the Universal Analytics platform is closed down.
What Should We Do?
You will need to migrate over to GA4 as soon as possible to start collecting data. Adding GA4 to your website now means you will have a transition period before Universal Analytics becomes inactive, allowing you to gather as much historic data as possible and familiarise yourself with the new platform. This is the best way to ensure continuity in your reporting.
We suggest making a backup of your historical reports as this will eventually become inaccessible.
What Is Different?
It's also important to understand that these two platforms are different and that some of the data in GA4 will not be comparable with Universal Analytics.
Universal Analytics captures user behaviour as ‘sessions’ and ‘pageviews’, whilst GA4 is based on an event and user data model; all interactions are classed as ‘events’.
GA4’s new user-centric metrics and dimensions use AI and machine learning to predict customer actions and implement more intelligent tracking.
GA4 has advanced analysis techniques in its Analysis Hub, that allow you to uncover deeper insights into your customers’ behaviours that go beyond the standard reports in UA.
Enhanced Measurement Events are also new for GA4. These allow you to automatically measure certain events such as page views, page scrolls, outbound clicks and video engagement. These are automatically set up upon installing GA4, but can be toggled off if needed. Previously, to track these events in Universal Analytics, you would have had to first create these in Google Tag Manager.
For GA4 properties (non-Analytics 360 version), retention of user-level data, including conversions, can be set to a maximum of 14 months. For all other event data, it is pre-set to 2 months but you can manually change this to 14 months.
Deadlines
After the 1st of July 2023, Universal Analytics will officially retire and will no longer process new data. Old data will be accessible within the platform for at least 6 months. So by the end of 2023, you will no longer be able to access your current Universal Analytics data.
Need Help Migrating From Universal Analytics to GA4?
Here at Reeds, our team of digital marketing experts can support your business through a GA4 Migration. Whether you already track and measure your website's analytics or would like to start today, contact us to get ahead of the game.