What is Google Universal Analytics (UA)?
Google has provided analytical services since November 2005 and launched Google Universal Analytics (US) in 2013. It has been the cornerstone of understanding site traffic, how many visitors you had, where they had come from and what they looked at, for and did on your site. Now after a decade UA is being retired from service and Google Analytics 4 has already been launched and is planned to replace it in July 2023.
As we all know UA has been a hugely powerful tool in providing a range of knowledge and reporting to businesses about their digital real estate. There are in some cases 10 years of business data and consumer insights embedded in the tool. So the idea that this is due to be switched off so soon, should be cause for concern! However, it’s not all bad news, GA4 is even more powerful than its predecessor, providing even greater granular knowledge on how visitors are accessing and using our websites.
Google is shutting down UA and upgrading to GA4
GA4 is more than an upgrade. It’s a completely new data model with an entire rewrite of the platform, and it integrates better with other Google products, including Google Ads, Firebase, and BigQuery.
The main difference is that UA is session-based and GA4 is event-based. In UA, everything is tracked as a session, and a session is defined as a period of time during which a user interacts with your website. With GA4, the data model is event based, and it does still understand sessions. Events can be anything that happens on your website, such as pageviews, video views, button clicks, submission of forms and any other interactions that you choose to include in your reports. Event based tracking allows much more flexibility and control over how you capture and report on your data.
Benefits of GA4:
- GA4 is event based and allows a level of detail and depth that UA cannot deliver.
- GA4 has a configurable measurement protocol that allows you to accurately filter out referrals from specific domains, and prevent spam referrals.
- UA is limited to only 20 parameters per session, but with GA4 there are no limits. You can define any parameters you want, including custom metrics and dimensions, and this gives you a much richer data set.
- GA4 uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to “read” your data, identify patterns, and surface insights that you might not have found on your own. e.g.it might identify a decline in conversions and automatically surface the root cause (for instance a change in your pricing structure).
No matter how much of an improvement this may be and that Google claims they will make the transfer as painless as possible when the time comes, those of us in the know are urgently transferring our Analytics process and reporting to GA4 now. For large sites and especially Ecommerce websites this is essential. The more historical data you have on GA4 the better, so moving now should be a matter of urgency and may require some hand holding especially within Header code changes / Google Tag Manager and within Data Studio and reporting transfers.
Who can help me to migrate from UA to GA4?
Voodoo can help with the whole process of migrating you from Universal Analytics to GA4.
- Creating a GA4 Account
- Creating and mapping the events in Tag Manager
- Ensuring you are capturing the key activities, events and conversions you did before
- Exporting your UA data
- Creating a historical data lake that you can report on
- Transferring your reporting to GA4 and Datastudio
Our specialist team at Voodoo will be able to provide you with all of these solutions as well as consultancy on any of the areas mentioned in this article.
Packages:
To try and help you identify the type of package you may need from Voodoo we have outlined our 3 current packages, however, for Enterprise clients we are able to discuss and provide bespoke packages.
Premium package:
- Creating a GA4 Account
- Creating and mapping the events in Tag Manager
- Ensuring you are capturing the key activities, events and conversions you did before
- Exporting your UA data
- Creating a historical data lake that you can report on within our AWS secure environment
- Transferring your reporting to GA4 and Datastudio
Standard package:
- Creating a GA4 Account
- Creating and mapping the events in Tag Manager
- Ensuring you are capturing the key activities, events and conversions you did before
- Exporting your UA data
Basic package:
- Creating a GA4 Account
- Creating and mapping the events in Tag Manager
- Ensuring you are capturing the key activities, events and conversions you did before
