Google announced its Universal Analytics (UA) product will be replaced by Google Analytics 4 on July 1st, 2023.
At that time, standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data. A complete deprecation of the platform will happen on July 1, 2024.
Migrating to GA4 is a must if you or your organization uses Google Analytics to measure website performance. While it may seem like you have a year to prepare for the change; keep in mind that you will not be able to conduct year vs year comparisons in the new application until you have collected 13 months of data. Since the two data collection approaches are different, expect there to be a period of confusion and reconfiguration to get the new system collecting and reporting the information you need.
Benefits of using the new GA4
Some of the main benefits of using Google Analytics 4 include: better integrations with other Google products, extended segmentation, cross-platform tracking, advanced analysis and Google Tag Manager tracking server support.
Adding a Google BigQuery integration to the mix will also help make the most of the unsampled data made available from GA4. The Bigquery + GA4 combination enables the processing of many large queries at very high speeds which allows for the analyzing of more data in less time.
You need to preserve your historic UA data
Data preservation is the main key here, and exporting historical reports is highly recommended. A transfer of critical UA data to a data warehouse allows continued access and data ownership.
To make things easier, we suggest using an Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) tool to preserve and transfer your UA data like our Launchpad solution.
Launchpad already supports both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 in its native connector. This will allow you to easily transfer data from Google Universal Analytics to a data destination (warehouse) of choice like Google Bigquery, MySQL, Azure Blob or AWS S3.
We typically provide services around the set-up Launchpad and help facilitate data transfer to customers' data warehouses while also providing professional services around post-project for additional data source transfers, data transformations and/or ongoing visualization support.
In addition, we also provide BigQuery query conversion services to assist with simple report conversions, but only where the dimensions and metrics are consistent between the two systems.
Conclusion
Launchpad already supports both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 in its native connector, making it a snap to preserve your historical data.
Launchpad is our powerful and easy to use one stop shop to transfer data from an array of domains to destinations of your choice. It helps customers easily access their data and transfer it to their preferred data warehouse where it can then be transformed, analyzed and visualized.
