Universal Analytics Is Going Away: What Should You Do Now?
Header Image by @justin_morgan via Unsplash
[UPDATE] This article was published in 2022, and Universal Analytics web properties are no longer available. If you’re looking to learn how to use Google Analytics 4, check out some of my newest articles that will help get you started.
There was some big news from Google recently regarding upcoming changes to Google Analytics, which is that they are officially sunsetting Universal Analytics (UA) properties as of July 1, 2023.
What does this mean for you?
If you have a website or app that uses Universal Analytics tags, after July 1st, 2023 your UA property will no longer process new HITS, meaning that as of July 2nd, 2023 no new data will flow into your UA account. In addition to this, Google will retain your historical data in your UA property for at least 6 months, after which your UA property's historical data will be deleted permanently. Note that the timeline for when GA will begin deleting historical data does not yet seem to be finalized, as they've mentioned "at least" 6 months. And their recent blog post stated "In the coming months, [Google will] provide a future date for when existing Universal Analytics properties will no longer be available". So more updates on this later.
You can read more about the update here. And you can monitor future updates about Google Analytics here.
So what do you need to do?
1) Get familiar
If you're not already using a GA4 property and are more familiar with UA, then now is the time to learn how to use it. Data is quantified very differently in GA4, and the interface and the metrics available are also quite different.
The GA4 interface is very different from UA, so getting familiar with where things are (i.e. metrics) and how to customize basic reports is a good place to start. If you don’t have a website yet with GA4 and you want to start getting familiar with it, you can check out the Google Analytics Demo account, which can be accessed here (scroll down and click on Google Analytics 4 property: Google Merchandise Store (web data)). This demo account is hooked up to the Google Merchandise Shop, which is a real website that sells Google merch. What’s great about this is you’ll have access to real/live data from a web property with a robust volume of web traffic, which is great for learning.
However, a drawback of the GA demo account is that you can’t customize anything, and I find that the real value of GA4 lies in your ability to fully customize things, from metrics to dashboards to reports. To help you with this, I recently published a beginner’s guide to how to customize reports in GA4, which you can watch below.
I also have a full-stack marketing analytics course on Udemy that covers everything from GA4 properties to Google Data Studio. You can use the link below to get 90% off my course for the next 30 days!
2) Get setup
If you don't already have a GA4 property setup on your website or app, you will definitely want to get this done ASAP. You can check out my own video on setting up GA4 accounts, alongside UA properties, for some guidance on how to get started.
3) Backup your data
Since UA properties will be permanently deleted you should consider exporting your historical data. You can learn more about exporting your UA data here.
What’s important to understand here is that Google has indicated that they will not retain your UA data forever, and the current plan is to keep your data hosted for at least 6 months (though this might change). So if keeping your historical data on hand is important, you should start thinking about how you want to store and use your back data. One simple solution would be to store the data in Google Sheets, then connect it to Google Data Studio so you can still visualize and analyze it, rather than having it stuck in an offline format like Excel.
That's it for now. Thanks for reading.
