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The Bold New Face of Twitter: Breaking the Traditional Brand Launch Mould 27th July, 2023 The Bold New Face of Twitter: Breaking the Traditional Brand
Introduction to GA4 migration
Why is GA4 migration necessary?
How to migrate to GA4
New features in GA4
Move to GA4 now!
On 1st July Google will be turning off data collection Universal Analytics (UA), which has been around since October 2012. Until fairly recently this was the latest version of Google’s free web analytics offering, but after nearly a decade, in October 2020 Google introduced Google Analytics 4 (commonly known as GA4 to save time in discussions at the office!) which has run alongside UA for a few years now.
Whilst the UA interface will remain accessible, it will stop collecting/processing new data at the start of July, so it’s important to make sure that GA4 tracking is implemented ASAP. This is for a number of reasons:
Okay, strictly speaking it’s not necessary to move to GA4 — you could have a website without any analytics (not recommended!), or you could opt for a different system than Google Analytics 4.
There are more niche/affordable options out there, such as Matomo and Piwik, as well as big hitters such as Adobe. If you’re really keen then you could look into more hardcore approaches such as building your own web analytics platform (probably rarely necessary outside of FTSE 500 companies) or using the basic log files that come with most web hosting.
If you’re reading this, however, chances are that you are currently using Google Analytics and therefore the most straightforward thing to do is to just update the version to GA4, and here are some other strong reasons to:
This section refers to “how to technically move onto the GA4 platform” — not “how to do everything in GA4 you did in UA”. The reason for that is that it would be impossible to go into detail that worked for everyone, because over time people customise their software to fit their organisation or business. In general though, the steps would as follows:
Create a new GA4 property
Add code to web site (there are various way to do this including a fairly automated approach if you have UA already set up)
Optional: add code to your apps, if applicable (NB: this is a whole different post at some point)
Log into the new property in GA4!
Google’s own checklist seems a good place to start if you want to go through the process yourself.
Done, right? Nope, there’s plenty more to do before you actually have parity with where you were in Univeral Analytics.
It seems like a lot, but the good news is that analytics migrations don’t happen that often, and there are some really good reasons that Google have decided to push this out as a new version rather than a seamless upgrade to an old interface/methodology. In the next sections we’ll look briefly at some of the new features that GA4 brings in.
There are a whole bunch of new ways of thinking or new features that come your way with GA4, some of which we’ve touched upon above. We’d strongly encourage users to take this opportunity to learn more about analytics in general (i.e. what it can do for you as a discipline), but also how to get the most out of GA4. Since you’re being asked to move to and learn a new(ish) system, it’s a natural time to spend a little more time learning more than just the basics. Some key new features to consider are below:
GA4 is here already, and pretty soon unless you opt for a different web analytics tool entirely, you’re going to want to get cracking on this right away (last year, ideally). That is unless you don’t want to know how your website is performing (outside of the sales etc. you can see in other tools/as they come through).
We love analysis so strongly recommend all users take advantage of updating to GA4 as soon as possible — no doubt you know your business inside out but there are always things that we can only know by looking at data in detail, and GA4 is one of those tools that can help with that. Also, there is nothing more satisfying than identifying a trend, problem or opportunity and responding to it in a way that makes things work better, ultimately benefiting your business.
If you’re interested in getting some help migrating to GA4 then drop us a line!
The Bold New Face of Twitter: Breaking the Traditional Brand Launch Mould 27th July, 2023 The Bold New Face of Twitter: Breaking the Traditional Brand
Are you ready for GA4 Migration? 14th June, 2023 Hurry, before it’s too late! All standard UA properties will stop processing data on July 1,
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