Google Analytics Universal is coming to an end. What does this mean for your Business?
Google Analytics Universal is coming to an end. What does this mean for your Business?
If you're a marketing professional or an owner of a business, you must have heard the news about the end of Google Analytics.
From July 1st 2023, Universal Analytics (UA) properties will cease processing new hits.
What does this mean for your company? In this blog, we'll cover why Google Analytics universal is ending.
Read on to learn more!
What Is Universal Analytics?
Universal Analytics is the Google Analytics platform version 3 that was introduced through Google at the end of 2012.
Universal Analytics allows you to gather and analyse information from your site. It offers you insight into your audience, traffic and conversions.
Universal Analytics provides enhanced capabilities, such as customized dimensions and custom metrics. It also lets you connect your Web tracking with different Google products, such as Google Ads, Google Search Console or Google Data Studio, that provide more insight into your customers' behaviours.
Universal Analytics can help you better understand your clients and make better-informed decisions regarding your product and marketing initiatives.
Since its introduction, Universal Analytics has become the most popular Web Analytics platform, with most users relying on Google's tracker platform. But in the meantime, since Google continues to improve and add the latest features to users, they tend to create new products that are the preferred choice.
In this instance, they created an app that's been available since July 2019 (Web and App) and changed its name to Google Analytics 4 in October 2020.
Google announced it would gradually remove Universal Analytics over the next couple of years in favour of its brand new GA4 analytics system.
GA4 has been designed to make it more adaptable and user-friendly. It also has better data collection, storage, and analytics features. Google added that GA4 would ultimately be able to replace Universal Analytics entirely.
Is the end of Google Analytics Universal going to affect your business, and what does it mean for businesses?
UA will not be functional from July 1st 2023. However, Google will not provide security patches or updates to the platform. This could create a security risk to your data, leading to data loss and restricting your ability to use the latest features and integrations.
Therefore, if you're employing Universal Analytics, you'll want to transition to GA4 as soon as possible. This will ensure you can access the latest tools and measures to protect yourself.
Cloud security analytics are advising to install and use GA4 concurrently with UA. This will allow you to have the chance to understand better and master GA4's new GA4 platform and allow you to evaluate it against UA in real-time, even while it's running.
Be aware that if you plan to conduct year-to-year comparisons, it is necessary to have a minimum GA4 tracking system in place before June 2022 to record all of the year's data using GA4.
What are the main changes coming with Google Analytics 4?
With the introduction of GA4, Google is introducing a new way to measure activity. GA4, Google is giving companies a new method to track their website and app activities. GA4 provides several advantages over the prior Universal Analytics approach, including better information collection, analysis and storage capabilities.
It also provides greater predictive data, cross-platform compatibility, enhanced privacy security measures, and the integration of current AI and machine-learning models into the platform. But what are the key modifications that create Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 different?
1. The primary distinction between these two platforms is that the data model is now more modern. Google Analytics 4 uses measurement models built on parameters and events, which are classified into four groups (automatically collected events and enhanced measurement events, suggested events, and custom events). The idea is that any interaction could be recorded as an event. This implies that all universal Analytics hits are converted to GA4 events.
2. A hit in UA is categorized as well as an action and its hit type. In GA4, the moment each hit is considered to be an "event", and there is no category, action or label. You can (but not necessarily need to) utilize variables when creating your events. New event parameter options available in GA4 permit you to customize your message to your needs even more. GA4 can now provide up to 25 different options for customization for a single event created by the user.
3. Elimination of monthly hit limit. The removal of the monthly limit on hits is a major distinction between Universal Analytics and GA4. GA4's free edition of UA was able to record 10 million hits per month, but this is not an issue anymore with the GA4 platform.
4. The final major distinction between GA4 and UA is that GA4 provides free access to BigQuery, previously only available to GA360 customers. BigQuery allows huge and complex databases to be processed efficiently without sampling limitations.
Final Thoughts
The final phase of the Universal Analytics era is upon us; however, this doesn't mean you need to panic. Companies must look ahead and embrace the new realities. Your business can be prepared for the transition towards Google Analytics 4 right now and make sure that you do not lose any data or information about the performance of your website.
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