For eighteen years, Google Universal Analytics (a.k.a. UA) has been every brand’s main analytics platform. But, now, it’s time to say our farewells. As of 1 July 2023, the new analytics platform brands will need to look to is Google Analytics 4, also known as GA4. 

Why the change? Well, a lot has happened in the digital world since Google UA first launched! 

Back in the day, the web was a place to search for facts, watch videos, make e-commerce purchases, and to use social media. And all that information was neatly tracked on web pages in a way that made it easy for brands to learn more about their audience’s behavior. 

Today, however, we have more devices to access the web and many more online activities—from banking and dating, to shopping and studying. This has made customer journeys and the way brands measure them way more platform-fragmented and harder to track. 

On top of this, GDPR, cookie banners, and user privacy measures have played a huge role in shaping the tracking landscape we knew from UA. 

Given all of these changes, Google introduced GA4 to track users across different devices and platforms, while still respecting user privacy and being as GDPR compliant as possible. GA4 accomplishes all of this with a lot of different built-in features such as anonymizeIP and User-ID, which help track users without collecting IP addresses and reach users across devices and/or platforms.

These features make GA4 a tool built to track today’s users and their online behaviour, which is great–but the sunsetting of UA does have some drawbacks.

If you have any dashboards running on data from UA, these will become obsolete unless the data source is switched to a GA4 data source. After the 1st of July 2023, nothing will be tracked in UA anymore. Furthermore, if you have Goals from UA that are imported into Google Ads, these need to be updated with data from Conversion Events in GA4 as well.

But never fear, we’ve created this handy-dandy Google Analytics setup checklist to make sure that you’ve ticked all the boxes you need to be up and running with your brand’s new GA4 setup.

Download our GA4 checklist to make sure your new or existing GA4 property is configured correctly, enabling you to still collect all the relevant data once UA will be sunsetted on 1 July 2023.