“If you could find out the day you were going to die, d’you reckon you’d want to know?”

 

 

“No, I think just the knowing and watching it get closer would eat at me too much”

 

 

If you work in digital marketing, it might feel like knowledge of that death-date has been forced upon you by Google’s announcement around Google Analytics this week. In their own words,

 

 

“All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023, and 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. After that, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months.”

 

 

That last part has massive implications, and for some reason it’s not getting much attention from bigger publications. If we can access our data for 6 months, that means by month 7 all our Universal Analytics data will be gone. Not coming back. All our goals, audiences and conversion data won’t exist anymore. By 2024, if you have a good set of year-on-year comparisons to go off that’ll be a full-blown competitive advantage.

There are a few reasons Google have decided to take this step, the main 2 being;

 

 

  • Because of its design, Universal Analytics will never comply with GDPR (or CCPA, or any similar legislation which comes along later)- so far Austria and more recently France have decided it’s illegal due to the way data is processed, so its days were numbered in any case.
  • Universal Analytics uses 20-year-old architecture based on cookies and hits; as a result it really struggles with cross-device tracking, among other essential modern functions. This isn’t something you can update away from within the same framework.

 

 

As much as we love it, UA has taken us as far as it can and it’s time for it to make way for Google Analytics 4. GA4 is built on brand-new event-based architecture (which is why your UA data won’t transfer over) and is set up to handle cross-device tracking and app traffic from the get-go, things UA (which was GA3) could never do very well if at all.

 

 

“Oh okay, so we’re getting something new and better in its place? That doesn’t sound bad at all, why all the doom and gloom?”

 

 

 

Not quite. The general consensus so far is that GA4 is nowhere near ready to replace UA in terms of functionality, with basics like the landing page report and ecommerce reporting missing or incomplete vs what we’re used to in UA. Most things can be custom-built within GA4 already but that doesn’t really cut it for small business owners and busy marketers.

 

 

As of right now GA4 can gather better, more useful data on how our website traffic is behaving but it’s a lot more difficult to gather insights from that data. In the end it could be brilliant but marketers are sceptical about whether the platform will be up to snuff in time for UA’s tragic end. Big players like Shopify have yet to support it at all, and part of Google’s reasoning for announcing the UA sunset must be to inspire urgency in 1st and 3rd-party support/plugin providers.

 

 

Google have work to do then, and so do you if your GA4 setup still needs work; we’ll be doing our own research and posting updates as we go, so follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter and send us a message if you’d like a hand!