Standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data on July 1, 2023. 360 properties will continue processing data until July 1, 2024. You will continue to have access to Universal Analytics until platform turndown on July 1, 2024. Turndown is the same date for both standard and 360 properties. You will lose access to the Universal Analytics user interface on July 1, 2024.

Prepare for the future

There have been many significant developments throughout the history of Google Analytics. From Urchin to Universal, GA has continued to push the boundaries of what a digital analytics tool can do.

We have seen the advent of cross-platform tracking, online-to-offline integrations, automated customer insights, and much more over the past decade. At the same time, the marketing environment has also become increasingly complex, creating both challenges and opportunities.

The latest evolution of GA, a.k.a. Google Analytics 4, is built with this increasing complexity in mind and is designed to support your marketing endeavours for the next decade and beyond.

Benefits of GA4

The most significant change with GA4 is the shift towards customer-centric reporting and event-based data collection. This architecture enables more powerful reporting and analysis features than ever before. The new Analysis Hub provides you with the tools to analyze conversion funnels, pathing, cohorts, and more, all within the GA interface.

The customer-centric nature of GA4 is further enabled through the integration of Google Signals, which allows GA4 to identify visitors across devices even without an assigned User ID. As customer journeys are increasingly fragmented across multiple devices and platforms, this feature will increase the accuracy of all reporting and analysis in GA4.

GA4 also takes a huge step forward in defining what an out-of-the-box analytics tool can provide. Through Enhanced Measurement, GA4 automatically tracks common user interactions including downloads, outbound clicks, site search, videos, and scrolling. You can expect that the scope of automatic tracking may be expanded in the future as well. Enhanced Measurement reduces the amount of custom tracking that needs to be maintained and allows you to spend your time and money on more valuable analysis and optimization efforts.

We think the data collection, reporting, and analysis benefits are reason enough to get started with GA4 as soon as possible. GA4 has already become the default version for newly-created accounts and Universal Analytics will be sunset in 2023. So, the earlier you implement GA4, the earlier you can take advantage of these benefits and more.

Upgrading to GA4

In GA4, Google Analytics has essentially been rebuilt from the ground up. Upgrading to GA4 requires creating a new property in GA. It is not possible to convert your existing properties from Universal Analytics to GA4. Since your new property will start collecting data from scratch, we recommend running GA4 in parallel with your existing implementation until you have accumulated enough historical data to make it your source of truth.

The process of implementing GA4 can in fact be easier than it sounds. If your current implementation is well structured and aligns with your measurement needs, you can use existing triggers and variables in Google Tag Manager to send data to GA4 in parallel. It will of course require effort to design, test, and deploy tagging, but it will be less costly than a full-scale implementation.

However, if you are not entirely happy with your current implementation, upgrading to GA4 is an opportune time to audit the current state of your analytics and realign with your strategy and objectives. You should take advantage of the clean start that GA4 offers you and get your implementation right from the beginning.

The Dandelion team is ready to help you take advantage of this opportunity to future-proof your analytics implementation and make the most of GA4. Contact us today at info@dandelioninc.ca.