What you need to know about G4 Analytics

Google is sun-setting Universal Analytics on 1 July 2023 and replacing it with G4.

Even if your business doesn’t use Google Analytics to make strategic data-driven decisions yet, it is essential to upgrade to the new platform.

To make the upgrade, your website requires a small piece of code to be generated and installed, which is best done for you by your website developer.

What is Google Analytics and do I need it?

Google Analytics is an essential marketing strategy tool that provides key information to help you measure and track marketing campaigns.

Without it, you can’t see how you are doing, and won’t have any information about what is working for what is not.

So you won’t know how to allocate your online marketing spend or know if any of your efforts were successful.

Upgrading to G4 allows your website to continue collecting data.

If you have not yet upgraded to GA4, you won’t be able to see any historical data in your analytics account after 1 July 2023.

The impact for your business

From the end of use date, Google will no longer track traffic hits and provide data or reports for current or future online user behaviour.

Including but not limited to:

• eCommerce tracking

• Social hits + traffic

• Page tracking

• Event tracking

The new G4 upgrade offers a significant improvement in data protection and privacy. 

Important:

The new GA4 property will not backfill your account with any historical data when you upgrade. The new GA4 property will only collect future data from the date you started using it on your website. To see your previous historical data, you can use the reports in the older version in the Universal Analytics property.

Upgrading now vs Later

We highly recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible if you haven’t already done so. When Google makes the official switch over, you will already have a few months of data in the new GA4 account to compare with real-time information about the performance of your current marketing campaigns.

Access to old Universal Analytics Data

Google will provide you with access to previous historical data for a period of 6 months after the cut-off date. While GA4 fine-tunes their reporting options, reports from Universal Analytics are still available for use until the cut-off time.

Key dates

• Universal Analytics: end of use: 1 July 2023

• 360 Universal Analytics (agencies and large corporates): end of use: 1 October 2023

If you have any questions, just flick us a mail at hello@crispapplewebdesign.co.nz and our team will give you a hand.