I’ve left it too late. What do I do when the sun sets?
Google Analytics is sunsetting. There’s a lot of alarm at the moment around this, especially directly from Google itself, alongside agencies out there trying to help you to switch. The talk around events, changes and differences can be overwhelming - so what do you do? We’ve put together a list of what to do if you feel like you’ve left it too late.
Better late than never:
Get a GA4 account up and running right now. Ideally you’d have set this up last July, but the key thing here is to simply get the tags up and on your website. Make sure you implement it in a similar way to your UA tags, ensuring you are complying with your organisation’s data protection and cookie policies. The last thing you want is for July 1st to roll around and no longer be tracking any data.
Work out what you need data wise:
Get together a list of your reports, metrics and data points which you regularly report on to stakeholders or internal shareholders. Work out what these are and where these are inside GA4. There’s a new feature called explorations which allows you to build out custom reports, but most likely you’ll need to use the pages or session acquisition views for most of your reporting. There are still session metrics inside GA4, despite all the talk about events - most of what you need is likely to still be there.
List all the key things you want to track:
In an ideal world, you’ll have a list of things from Universal Analytics that you track. Cut this list down to the absolute basics that will get you through July. The good news is that GA4 works by automatically tracking a wide range of events, such as downloads and form submissions, which work across the majority of websites. With a few small clicks you’ll have a wide range of events you can now report on. If you have any goals in Universal Analytics, bring them over by setting them up again using the event set up. If you have set up custom events inside Google Tag Manager for your current Universal Analytics set up, it’s relatively straightforward to change the tag types and move them over.
Get familiar with the interface:
GA4 is a different product to any previous incarnations of Google Analytics. It’s actually a tool called Firebase Analytics which has been reskinned and repurposed as Google Analytics. The best thing to do is to orient yourself inside the platform. Find the session acqusition report (this would be Channels inside UA) and the Pages report (Behaviour > Page inside UA). Try changing the date, filtering on page type, changing the primary dimension. Give yourself an hour to play around with it and you’ll see it’s similar in these places to what you had in UA. We’re experts in getting people up to speed, so get in touch if we can help you with this.
Understand key changes in the platform:
Here are a few changes that are worth spending time understanding when you get the chance:
Streamlined Reporting: GA4 provides a simplified and streamlined reporting experience, making it easier to access and understand critical metrics.
Event based: GA4 only collects events, so everything is an event. This means metrics like Event count will show you counts of page_views as well as everything else.
No more views: GA4 has no views - you get all your data in one place and then you need to filter. Don’t worry about this as you can apply domain level or page level filters to reports and explorations.
Engagement metrics: Bounce rate is calculated differently and there is a new metric called ‘Engaged Sessions’. Get to grips with this.
Customisation: GA4 offers greater flexibility in customising reports and dashboards, allowing you to tailor your analytics to your specific business needs.
Communicate the change with stakeholders internally:
You may be the only ones within your company who know that this change is coming. Communicate that across your organisation clearly, now. Explain that some of the metrics and dimensions in reports may change, but that you’ll explain these when it comes to the change over time in July. Attempt to understand which stakeholders use UA and will be impacted by the change. We can support in training stakeholders - so get in touch if you need support with this.
Don’t put it off if you’re a premium user:
If you’re a premium user, you’ve got time - but not a lot! You can keep using UA for one more year, but to be honest it’s better to jump than be pushed. Use the next year wisely to plan moving over your account. As a premium user your account is likely to be complex, so a plan of what you move when, how you train and migrate is critical.
We’ve helped numerous websites and organisations move from UA to GA4, and then trained them to use GA4 confidently and efficiently. Get in touch if you think you need our help, or book some time to pick our brains on what your next steps are.
