GA4 Cometh July 1st. We Can Help You Migrate.

Aside from the fact that AI is plotting your imminent destruction, the worst kept secret on the internet is that Google Analytics 4 lands for real on July 1st.

Your current Google Analytics profile data (aka: Universal Analytics or UA) stops gathering data on that day but it doesn’t disappear for a while yet so you can save it somewhere if you care to.

Am I too late to make the switch?

Almost but not quite. You can find more detail on the differences between UA and GA4 in our previous post on the topic. Ideally your GA4 was set up and collecting data properly for you on July 1st of last year so that your year over year reporting remains intact. We’re more realists than idealists here though so if you’re just getting around to it now you’re in good last-minute company.

It’s worth noting that the two flavours of Analytics literally measure things differently. This means that even if you clone your UA profile as much as you can with GA4, the numbers you see going forward will look a bit different than those to which you’re accustomed.

What can Search Warrant do for me?

I see you’re done with small talk. Depending on what your organization needs, we offer a gold, silver, or bronze approach to ensuring your web performance data flows on July 2nd.

At the top of the podium, ‘gold’ means we add all the necessary codes to your site, debug and fix tracking issues in a separate instance of Google Analytics, and create a new ‘clean’ GA4 profile containing the tracking and reporting you want or a close facsimile. Similarly, we’ll migrate up to 10 of your existing goals to their GA4 incarnation, establish ecommerce tracking if need be, and do it all of it in your Google Tag Manager (GTM) container. If you’re not using GTM we can still help but it’ll take more effort. Finally, we’ll set up customer reports and audiences if needed and report back to you regularly on what GA4 tells us about your site.

And what does silver look like?

The second step on the GA4 medal podium gets you everything that gold does without ongoing monitoring and reporting after we hand off your shiny new GA4 instance to you.

Bronze GA4 service

You’re still on the podium! At this level we support your team as they lead the migration. We’ll help validate the setup and point out any stray bits or bytes. Your organization gets some assurance that it has migrated to GA4 and a sober second set of eyes has reviewed the implementation to help ensure it’s sound.

There is a 4th step on this unique podium too for the gamblers among us. The fourth step – let’s call it pewter – is to wait and see if your firm can get by with the default GA4 profile Google will automatically set up for you.

If your organization doesn’t rely on the data from Analytics today and nobody knows if there are goals there or not or even what they mean, then you could keep on keeping on because it may not matter to your organization.

That said, it’s a real opportunity for those laggard businesses that don’t know what happens on their web sites to raise their games and jump on the GA4 band wagon.

Wherever you find yourself on the podium, we’ve got the Gatorade, a flag, and an ice bath waiting for you when you’re ready. Drop us a line and we’ll get back to you. If we don’t, please persist! It just means we’re migrating profiles for other folk as fast we can and struggling to get to our inboxes.