Take action before July 1 to retain access to your historical data
From July 1, 2024, Google Analytics users won't be able to access any Universal Analytics properties, and all data will be deleted - you won’t even have read-only access.
While the standard sunset took weeks to complete, the full Universal Analytics shutdown will happen within a week. We're here to help ensure you don't lose your historical data before it's gone for good.
Google Analytics 4 has replaced Universal Analytics
Goodbye UA, hello GA4!
A year ago, GA4 became the primary web analytics service offered by Google. Used to track and report on website, mobile and app traffic, Analytics is an indispensable marketing tool for any business, so the change from UA to GA4 was big news for businesses and their marketing teams, and it was vital that the transition was a smooth one.
Back in 2023, UA stopped processing data and Ascensor’s CRO team supported our clients in migrating their data over to GA4 for uninterrupted traffic and key event reporting.
Since the migration to GA4, property owners have been able to access historical data from UA to compare and track traffic prior to the switch with current GA4 data. However, from July 1 2024, you won’t be able to access this data at all.
Why is storing historical data from UA important?
Data is important to you, your business, and your marketing team. By keeping a record of historical data, you’ll be able to perform historical data queries such as comparing 5 years’ worth of data, or anything pre-UA switchover. If you don’t retain your historical data, you’ll still be able to compare data year-on-year but won’t be able to make historical queries.
Hey Google, what are you playing at?
Unfortunately, the way Google has implemented the switch from UA to GA4 is far from smooth. As much as we’d love to be able to compare historical data to current trends at the click of a mouse, this isn’t immediately possible with the default Google set-up. But don’t worry, our CRO team is here to help!
A quick note - at the time of the switchover, we supported each of our clients to migrate their UA accounts over to GA4. If you weren’t with us at the time, or are catching up on the implications of UA’s shutdown, you can get in touch with us to ensure that your UA configurations were copied to your new GA4 property correctly. If no action was taken during the switch, your UA configurations will have been automatically copied to a new GA4 account for you by Google. Unfortunately, not all configurations in Universal Analytics have an obvious counterpart in GA4, so get in touch with us if you’d like to check that your GA4 is set up correctly and processing data as you’d like.
What are the next steps?
There are several options available to you in order to keep your historical UA data. Remember, you must take action before July 1 to retain access before it is deleted for good.
Export your data to BigQuery
The best way to keep your existing analytics data is to export it into BigQuery, as recommended by Google (and us) for Google Analytics 360 customers. BigQuery is Google’s fully managed low-cost data warehouse for analytics, so it’s easy to manage and access. By using BigQuery, you can keep your historical data and monitor website performance.
Other ways to store your data
Other ways to store your UA data includes exporting individual reports into formats such as:
CSV
TSV
TSV for Excel
Excel (XLSX)
Google Sheets
PDF
Cloud storage
You can also use the Google Analytics Reporting API to export data to cloud storage and connect to Looker Studio.
Google Sheets add-on
An alternative option is to install the Google Sheets add-on for Analytics to archive your data.
Don’t worry - we’re here to help!
If you need assistance with your Google Analytics accounts, contact our team today and we'll be happy to support and guide you through the process.