Your Plan to Migrate Your Clients to G4
On July 1, 2023 Google Universal Analytics is going away. “Universal Analytics” is the current version of Google Analytics and what you have been using for years and what you’ve been sending to your clients for monthly reporting.
Conversion Pipeline customers and partners are accustomed to seeing the data on their monthly Dashboard:
- Visits
- Visits from Organic Traffic
- Form Conversions
- Bounce Rate
- And on and on…
Your Universal Analytics will be sunset on July 1 and you’ll be forced into using Google Analytics 4 (G4).
G4 is different from UA and so your reports will be changed and some of the metrics used will change.
Some key differences between UA and G4 are covered here in this recent post:
- Effective at tracking website + App ecosystems
- Can handle cookieless browsing and new privacy-based changes
- Uses “events” that happen on your website compared to tracking visitors
- New data structure – G4 collects and stores data in a new way
Bottom Line for Marketing Teams Migrating to G4
You have to get G4 set up and configured. After July 1, you will no longer be getting any data from UA, so you need to do this now.
We suggest that it would be best to get G4 set up well in advance so that you have some overlap and can get used to the new data presentation.
Migrating to G4 can be pretty simple, or more complex depending on your website and what you want to track. In all cases, however, the following steps must happen:
- Create the new G4 Property
- Create the Events you want to track
- Use Google Tag manager for certain Events like call tracking
- Set some Events as Conversions
- Test the new configuration using Real Time tools
- Link your new G4 property to your Google Ads account (and any other advertising platform)
- Import G4 Conversions to advertising platform(s)
If the only conversion you have is a single Form Submission conversion, all the above steps still have to happen, but things are relatively simple.
For eCommerce websites, websites that have a companion App, websites that have many conversion goals, or sites that have custom javascript triggering events, the process is necessarily more complicated.
G4 Migration Process
- Access – To get this done, we’ll need admin access to Google Analytics, website access, Google Tag Manager, and Google ads. For existing Conversion Pipeline customers, we already have this. For new clients or White Label clients, we’ll need to get access.
- Create new G4 property. There is a migration tool you may have seen, but sometimes the tool does not properly configure G4 and the tag has to be re-installed or manually modified. The tag will be set up and confirmed sending traffic.
- Data collection setup – the G4 setup will collect a standard set of data points and Events. No conversions are set up in default setup.
- Audit existing conversions. In many cases, there are conversions that exist in UA that are misconfigured and/or not needed. We need to evaluate and decide which conversions are needed in G4. For those that are used and needed, we’ll duplicate them in the new G4 property.
- Set up G4 Events including form conversions and call conversions (Callrail, for example). In UA, it is very common to have “Thank You Page Conversions” set up. We can keep this setup by creating an Event for a specific Page ID load.
Events and corresponding conversions are created for each identified conversion:- – Form submissions
- – Phone calls
- – Quote requests
- – Download gated content
- – Complete purchase
- – Any other conversion we want to track
- Testing in Real Time – after all is configured we will run tests on each conversion in Real Time to confirm tracking configuration is working as intended.
- After all testing, each G4 account will have to be linked to Google Ads and new conversion goals imported into Ads, and old conversion goals removed.
Level of Effort Migrating to Google Analytics 4
Every website has a unique setup in Universal Analytics. Sure some will be similar, but each has its own conversion goal setup. For our White Label agency partners, be aware that every client will have a different setup and will require a different level of effort to get analytics migrated to G4.
To get started on G4 migration for your clients, complete the form below and we’ll get you started. We’ve done a bunch of these, so we’ve seen it all and we’re really good at it. Contact us today and we’ll get this headache taken care of for you.
