Google Universal Analytics Is No More

The sunsetting of Google Analytics Universal Analytics in July 2023 will truly mark the end of an era in web analytics. When Google Analytics was first released in 2005 it was groundbreaking for businesses, developers, and marketers. It has remained a foundational piece of the web analytics toolkit for more than 15 years, persisting through massive changes in web technology. The announcement of the sunset of the Universal Analytics platform came as a shock to many in the analytics community.

What Does the Transition Mean for Users

Google would tell you that the transition to GA4 will be a simple, easy, and seamless process. The reality of the situation is much more complicated for many users. GA4 captures data in a different way than Universal Analytics so the tagging for it is new. The fields and interface that hold this data are different as well.

Updating Tagging Structure

The fact that GA4 tags capture data in a different way means that all of your existing tags will need to be rebuilt to support GA4. For each event that exists within Google Tag Manager you will need to build an additional tag tied to the same triggering to send data to GA4. GA4 also relies on a different dataLayer structure to capture e-commerce data. This means that users will either need to rebuild dataLayers on their sites or use Google Tag Manager’s custom JavaScript variables to reformat their data to support the GA4 structure.

See my GA4 e-commerce tagging GTM recipe here: https://amjones.co/ua-to-ga4-ecommerce-datalayer-gtm/ 

Updating Reporting

GA4 data capture is based off the firebase platform which means it’s optimized for collecting data from Mobile and Apps. It also means that the fields captured in reporting are more customizable. However, they don’t align with the existing fields captured in Universal Analytics. This means that reports that are currently powered by Google Analytics Universal Analytics connectors or data flows will need to be rebuilt using GA4 data.

Luckily Google has prepared a list of equivalencies between GA4 and Universal Analytics data: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/migration/api/reporting-ua-to-ga4-dims-mets

This will help you recreate reporting, but it’s not a guarantee that the data will match UA exactly. Rebuilding reports with GA4 data sources will mean also that your data will not go as far back. You have until July 2022 to implement GA4 if you want year over year data. If you have a data ETL and storage process you may be able to stitch GA4 data with historical UA data to get a longer loopback window, but parity is not guaranteed.

Lack of Current Functionality

The new GA4 platform still lacks many of the critical functions that current Universal Analytics users have become accustom to using. Things as simple as allowing user control over features like custom channel groupings and filters are currently missing from the administrative toolset. Instead users must set their filters via variables which leaves the IP, domain, and other matching to the end user in their tag manager. Setting custom utms for channel groupings is crucial for classifying campaigns from outside platforms.

GA4 also lacks the ability to map custom dimensions which are key for many users, particularly GA360 customers. Many GA360 customers have 50 or more custom dimensions that they use for advanced reporting. The expansion of the available customizations is one of the things that makes GA360 great, so to have them missing from GA4 makes implementation much more complicated. Google has the addition of custom dimensions on their roadmap, but the fact that they are missing at the time of the transition announcement is a huge miss.

Benefits of GA4

Although GA4 doesn’t seem fully ready for prime time and will require significant effort to setup, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t improve on Universal Analytics. GA4 configurations are wired in with what Google calls “Advanced Measurement” which integrates page view, scroll, outbound click, site search, video engagement, and file download tracking into the platform by default. The platform switch will also likely bring Google more in line with personal data laws like GDPR and CCPA which is likely why the transition came quickly after the French court ruling outlawing Google Analytics.