Google Sunsetting Universal Analytics In 2023

Google’s announcement of shuttering it’s previous generations of Analytics, known as Universal Analytics, is planned for mid-2023.

Universal Analytics, which was the standard version of Google Analytics before GA4 will stop processing new data on July 1, 2023

Universal Analytics 360 properties will have an extra three months of data processing, ending on October 1, 2023.

After those dates, Google Analytics 4 will be the only Google solution for monitoring website activity.

Why does this matter?

The quick reason – if you want to be able to compare year over year statistics now is the time to do it.

Additionally, Google is moving on from Universal Analytics due to its inability to deliver cross-platform insights.  Whereas GA4, on the other hand, can measure data across websites and apps. Where more of our clients are building not only websites but also mobile apps this is becoming more and more important every day.

Google Analytics 4 Is The New Standard

GA4 is designed to meet a number of key business objectives, such as driving sales or app installs, generating leads, and connecting online and offline customer engagement.

Here are several of the benefits offered by GA4:

• Flexibility: Univeral Analytics uses the measurement model based on sessions and pageviews, where GA4 uses the measurement model based on events and parameters. Allowing flexibility and superior measurement of all data points.
• Insights across touchpoints: Get a complete view of the customer lifecycle with a measurement model that isn’t fragmented by platform or organized into independent sessions.
• Data-driven attribution: Assigns attribution credit to more than just the last click, helping you understand how different marketing activities collectively influence conversions.
• More valuable data: Machine learning generates predictive insights about user behavior and conversions, creates new audiences of users likely to purchase or churn, and automatically surfaces critical insights.
• More actionable data: Expanded integrations with other Google products, like Google Ads, work across GA4’s combined web and app data, making it easy to use Analytics insights to optimize ad campaigns.
• Users’ Journey: With GA4 Google focused a lot of attention on the users journeys and the events triggered by them. With measurements across all platforms this allows for a true holistic view.
• It’s still free: GA4 is free and this includes several features that are available in the paid version of Google Analytics called UA 360.