Brayan Iliev
How to read your results: what drops mean and when not to take action
When ad results drop, panic leads to chaotic changes and even worse data. In this art...
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Google is shutting down Universal Analytics in 2023, forcing businesses to move to the new but more complex Google Analytics 4 platform. Want to understand how this change will affect your marketing strategy and data tracking? Read on to stay one step ahead.
In March this year (2022), Google announced that Universal Analytics will stop processing data in July 2023.
This caused quite a lot of frustration among marketers around the world, because it means switching to Google Analytics 4 – the “modern Universal”.
In this article you will learn more about the reasons for shutting down UA, its replacement with GA4 and what this means for you as a marketer and as a business owner.
For many businesses Universal Analytics is a key tool, because it holds all their data from the start of their marketing up to now. On top of that, GA4 lacks many of the ready-made features and reports that a marketer uses every day.
So why is Google replacing it? There are several known reasons:
We will look at each of them separately.
The old method of measuring user data is based on “sessions”. In non-technical terms, this means that when a user enters a website, a session starts running for them, and user actions were tracked with cookies.
So if a user clicked on a video 3 times, it was counted as 1 conversion.
This model, however, is outdated and was not designed for the way modern websites work.
To solve the problem, GA4 uses “events” to track what a user does on a page.
Every action counts as an event, for example “scroll”, “pageview”, “click”, “file_download” and so on, and each of them has its own parameters.
This way marketing departments can pull more precise reports in which they can track every action a user has taken.
The topic is broad, but put simply, Google announced that it wants to stop using “cookies” by 2023.
“…today we are making it explicit that once third-party cookies are removed, we will not build alternative identifiers to track users as they browse the web, nor will we use them in our products.”
David Temkin, Director of Product Management at Google
The problem with “cookies” is that they share information with third parties, and at a time when the privacy of our personal data matters more and more to society, Google cannot keep using “cookies”.
The challenge with any new software is getting used to its interface and features. The difference between GA4 and UA is really big.
So the first question we would ask is: “What is different?”
Again, there are several main differences between GA4 and UA that we notice:
As described above, one of the differences between UA and GA4 is precisely the way data is measured.
GA4 uses “events” to track what a user does on a page.
“Events” are the more modern way of tracking, with every user action counting as an event.
This is good news for marketers, because they can create custom reports with custom demographic groups, segments, filtered data, specific metrics and so on.
One of the benefits (in our team’s humble opinion) is the ability to build custom reports.
This gives more flexibility when working with clients and extends what Google Analytics can do.
We recommend reading our next article, where we show how to create custom reports.
Perhaps the biggest drawback of GA4 is the lack of a funnel tracking feature.
In Universal Analytics this has always been one of the features marketing departments used most.
At the moment there is no indication that Google will add the feature, which is where the alternatives to GA4 come in.
You can see all the differences in this article by Netpeak Journal.
There is not much time left before Universal Analytics stops working, so we advise you to switch to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible and run the two in parallel, so you get used to what is new in GA4 while it is already collecting data.
The worst thing you can let happen is not to move over from UA to GA4 and to start directly with an empty GA4 property, with no historical data from your ad campaigns.
There is a trend at Google of making its tools increasingly difficult to use. This creates the need to hire an agency or a freelancer to take on the task.
With the arrival of GA4, reliance on Tag Manager grows, and setting up Enhanced Ecommerce becomes very difficult without a marketing team and developers.
There are many differences, and changes in privacy policies, together with society’s wish for a cookie-free world, make a complete switch to GA4 necessary.
At Evol.bg we have started moving all our clients’ Analytics accounts to GA4 to prevent the loss of historical data, and we advise you to do the same, whether you are an agency, a freelancer or a business.
