Google Plans to Sunset Universal Analytics – Our Takeaway

April 13, 2022Joshua Barratt

Recently, Google announced that they will finally sunset Universal Analytics in 2023. While for some this has been expected for a while, it may still come as a surprise for many, especially if you’ve been putting off the implementation of Google Analytics 4.

Dates to Know

The dates that you need to know are:

• July 1, 2023 – Free Universal Analytics properties will stop processing hits.
• October 1, 2023 – 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing hits.
• January 1, 2024 – Data in UA becomes unavailable for reporting purposes.

Google Analytics 4 Enhancements and Features

Google’s new analytics platform, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is an exciting step forward in architecture and capabilities. The move away from the Page tracking model to an Event tracking model, which allows you to unify your data across web and applications, has been welcomed by the industry. Now, GA4 has almost reached a level of feature parity with Universal Analytics (UA), with many enhancements planned before UA is sunset in 2023.

GA4’s move away from the Page tracking model to an Event tracking model allows you to unify your data across web and applications. Click & Tweet!

Google Analytics 4 brings with it a host of new features more appropriate for today’s modern world of privacy-focused users with multiple devices. It offers more granular controls over data collection than its predecessor, no longer stores IP addresses, and has additional data-driven attribution capabilities to help you understand user behavior through your website funnel in more detail.

Getting Started with GA4

If you haven’t started making the transition already, now’s the time. As a long-time Certified Google Analytics Partner, Blast has helped many of our clients implement Google Analytics 4 in parallel with Universal Analytics to prepare them for the time when UA is turned off. This is to ensure they have enough rich historical data to make the transition seamless and can perform year-over-year analysis. It has also been a nice opportunity for many to review their tracking, optimize, prune, and add data points where necessary.

Google Analytics Consultants Here to Help

We understand though that many organizations might feel daunted by the prospect of the transition, especially if you’ve made big investments in the deployment of Universal Analytics and integrated it with your wider data-architecture using BigQuery. There may be a lot of other moving parts that require the care and attention of experts in the field to ensure adoption of GA4 causes as little disruption as possible. Blast is here to help. If you want to have a conversation and talk through a Google Analytics 4 migration roadmap, reach out to your Program Manager or contact us.

About the Author

Joshua Barratt

Joshua Barratt is a Senior Analytics Implementation Consultant at Blast Analytics. He has a unique blend of skills in both web development and analytics ensuring best-in-class strategy and implementation; from solution design through development, QA and deployment. He specializes in digital analytics, particularly Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics and a variety of tag management solutions.

Connect with Joshua on LinkedIn. Joshua Barratt has written 8 posts on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.