GA4 Migration

The bottom line

Google's Universal Analytics officially stopped collecting data on 1 July 2023. The new version, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is not a like-for-like migration and requires proper configuration. If not treated, it can lead to data loss and important reports and views going missing.

As technical marketing specialists we have a fast and effective process to make sure GA4 is properly configured for your sites with simple pricing packages to choose from based on the complexity of your set-up.

The hated analytics tool we all learned to love, Universal Analytics or “UA”the second major version of Google Analytics), claimed an enormous proportion of the web analytics market share over its ten year reign. No sooner had we finally settled into the relationship than did Google intervene and force a separation, promising to exchange our beloved companion for a leaner, cleaner iteration in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

The deadline was set, extended and finally came: on 30 June 2023, UA started ignoring our hits forever. For those who failed (or refused) to update their sites, Google attempted a hasty “automatic migration”, leaving all but the simplest GA4 set-ups in a state of confusion.

UA had a “traffic” and “hit-based” model, essentially seeing the world as a series of requests for URLs/pages by browsers to servers with all the contextual information typically embedded on the page. It had the capacity to understand “custom events”, ie. on-page actions and eCommerce transactions reasonably well with a bit of persuasion. Reporting was not terribly usable but we lived with the clunkiness lest we miss out on its ability to attribute traffic.

GA4 differs fundamentally from UA in the way it captures and “understands” data. In fact, it's not derived from UA at all—it's an evolution of Firebase Analytics which was originally developed for mobile devices. Apps don't really have the concept of pages, and neither do modern web pages which rebuild and mutate themselves on the fly using JavaScript.

The page a user first loads only tells you so much about what they are up to, as they may be looking at something very different by the next time the browser asks the server for a new page. For this reason, GA4 is “event-based”. It continuously streams little signals about the user's activity in the form of events with parameters to give more context.

The flow of all these events and their properties accumulates into a picture or timeline of what users are up to on your site and provides a basis for building your conversion and engagement reports (including for eCommerce).

The core problem is that the two systems capture and store data very differently, so there's no “upgrade path” from one to the other. You're really starting from scratch with GA4 and Google is so rudely going to stop UA from capturing your data at all.

To their credit, Google has gone to some effort to make the transition as smooth as is physically possible, like quietly upgrading the code snippets that run on websites to support sending data to both versions, but reporting and Goals won't automatically make their way across.

To ensure that you're well set-up for a GA4 world, you'll need to ensure the following:

• Ensure that on-site tags are correctly set-up for GA4 to capture data.
• Important Goals are manually recreated as Conversions.
• eCommerce data is being captured in the correct format for GA4.
• Any custom reports have been recreated in GA4.
• Links to any Google Ads accounts have been re-established.
• Your team is adequately trained in using GA4.
• Appropriate access has been set-up for your team.

We can generally perform or validate your GA4 migration for you for a fixed fee of $960 ex GST under the following conditions

• The site's existing UA implementation is via Google Tag Manager (GTM). If not, we are able to provide migration to GTM as a separate service.
• We have administrator access to your Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager accounts.
• If an eCommerce site, the existing purchase event and ecommerce property is already correctly populated. If not, we can simply provide specifications to your development team to resolve.
• We migrate only your top five converting Goals.
• No custom report migration is required. We can migrate custom reports as required for an additional fee.
• Up to one Google Ads account will be linked, and we have administrator access to it.