Google completed the transition from its longstanding Universal Analytics offering to the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in July 2023. To ensure your business continues to capture valuable website data, the switch to GA4 or comparable software is imperative.
For new and existing GA4 accounts, our helpful checklist below ensures you’re collecting the insights essential for your business.
Transitioning to GA4
A Google Analytics 4 property can be created at analytics.google.com. If you’ve yet to add analytics to your website, this webpage will walk you through the basic setup and installation.
If your website had a functioning UA property, Google likely auto-generated a basic GA4 property during the transitional period from your UA configuration. If not, Google Analytics does offer a GA4 Setup Assistant within its Admin section to assist in migrating your website from UA to GA4.
Getting More from GA4
Assuming your website has a GA4 property actively collecting data, there are additional steps you can take to collect advanced insights and leverage this data.
- Platform Integrations: ensure any platforms connected to your UA data (e.g. Google Ads or Google Merchant Center) are transitioned to your new GA4 property. This ensures continued access to any required audience or conversion data.
- Google Signals: this setting assists GA4 in associating user data across their multiple devices (e.g. laptops and mobile devices.) Google Signals provides a more comprehensive picture of visitors’ behaviors, often occurring across multiple touch points with your site and from more than one device. This setting is located within Admin > Property > Data Settings > Data Collection.
- Enhanced Measurement: measures additional interaction data not captured by GA’s default measurement. Enhanced Measurement was a noticeable addition with GA4, allowing easy measurement of interactions such as page scrolling depth, video engagement, and file downloads without requiring additional development involvement.
- Internal Traffic: GA4 doesn’t feature the property views that were a core UA element. Most businesses had utilized these for filtering certain types of traffic, such as internal site traffic from their staff. This functionality still exists within GA4 though is now set by visiting Admin > Data Streams > Configure Tag Settings (for Google Tag users), and Define Internal Traffic accessible via the Show All dropdown.
- Audiences: the ability to create and leverage specific segments of your site’s visitors also received an upgrade in GA4. Audiences are helpful for better understanding the behaviors of specific user groups (such as those arriving from a particular source or visiting a specific section of your site) and tailoring remarketing campaigns to keep them engaged. Viewing and creating audiences is accessible in the Admin section under Property settings. Create your preferred audiences within GA4 as soon as possible to begin capturing this data since audiences do not populate retroactively.
- Conversions: ensure you’ve migrated any important conversion events from UA to continue capturing these actions on your site and measuring marketing ROI. GA4 measures some events by default though it doesn’t automatically set them as conversions. Among the events not typically captured by default settings are form submissions and clicks to call so you’ll want to bring these into GA4 as soon as possible.
Your Universal Analytics Data
In July 2023, most UA properties ceased capturing data. Access to historical data was promised for a minimum of six months, and most properties are still accessible as of this latest article update.
If your organization requires this data, Google encourages exporting this information as soon as possible. Directly in the dashboard, UA properties allow the export of most data points via PDF or spreadsheet. Depending on your needs and the amount of data, you may want to leverage other Google products such as Looker Studio or BigQuery to aid in processing historical information.
Summary
Google’s Universal Analytics properties ceased capturing data in 2023. Ensure your business has migrated to Google Analytics 4 (or a comparable platform) to continue measuring important data from your website visitors. Additional tools are accessible in GA4 to enhance your data collection with more comprehensive and actionable insights.
