Google Sets Deadline for GA4 Transition

Google recently announced July 1, 2023 as the data on which Universal Analytics (otherwise known at GA3) will cease operations. This will give website owners and marketers 15 months to transition to Google Analytic 4 (GA4). We've put together a few solutions to minimize impact on your marketing reporting during this time of transition.

Google recently announced July 1, 2023 as the data on which Universal Analytics (otherwise known at GA3) will cease operations. This will give website owners and marketers 15 months to transition to Google Analytic 4 (GA4). At that point, GA3 will stop processing new data. Any website traffic after July 1, 2023 will not appear in GA3 Google Analytics views. Yet, Google did announce that it will continue to store historical data in GA3 for at least six months.

How does this news impact you?

• GA4 data is structured and presented in a way that is fundamentally different from GA3. In order to better understand the differences between the two platforms and how those differences will impact your online performance reports, we recommend running GA3 and GA4 parallel for as long as possible.
• It's often quite useful to glean insights from the historical data in Google Analytics. There is currently no way to transfer this data to GA4. It will be important to work with a system that imports and stores that useful data for future analysis. If you don't know where to start, we can help.

If your company relies on GA3 to measure, analyze and/or report on website or marketing channel performance, then it is crucial that you strategize to minimize the effects of this transition. The analytics team at Team SI saw this coming. We've beta tested a marketing analytics platform that can serve as a Google Analytics alternative. It ensures data backups and accurate reporting while also offering improved features over GA. We recommend taking one of the following two approaches to ensure you see minimal impact during this upcoming transition:

1. Begin running GA4 in parallel with GA3 as soon possible.
2. Get GA4 up and running as soon as possible. Then, upgrade your marketing analytics platform to include our Google Analytics alternative that offers everything that GA3 does and more.

We'll be publishing more information in the near future to help businesses through this transition. Get in touch with us to make sure you're the first to learn about our upgraded Google Analytics alternative solution.