Blogs

Universal Analytics (GA3) Coming to an End

On March 16th, Google announced July 1, 2023 as the date they plan to sunset Universal Analytics (also known as GA3). This gives website owners and marketers fifteen months to migrate to Google Analytics 4 (GA4).  On that date, GA3 will stop processing new data. Any traffic after that date will not appear in GA3 Google Analytics views. Beyond that, historical data will only be stored “for at least six months,” per the announcement.

How does this impact you? 

• GA4 data is structured in a way that is foundationally different from GA3. We recommend running both GA3 and GA4 in parallel for as long as possible to understand how those differences will impact your website engagement and marketing performance reports (as well as how to interpret them). 
• The historical data in GA can often provide useful insights, and there is no way to migrate it into GA4. We recommend investigating a system that can easily import and store that data in case it is useful for analysis in the future. Don’t know where to start? We can help.

If your company relies on Universal Analytics to measure, analyze and/or report on website or marketing channel performance, it is critically important to plan and implement a migration strategy. We saw this coming and have beta tested a marketing analytics platform that ensures data backups, accurate reporting, and improved features over GA. TracTru recommends one of two approaches:

1. Get GA4 running in parallel with GA3 as soon as possible.
2. Get GA4 running as soon as possible. Then, upgrade your marketing analytics stack to include our reporting solution that can import historical data, has data parity with GA, built-in heat mapping, session recording, deep form conversion analysis capabilities and more.

TracTru will be monitoring updates and publishing more information in the coming months, so get in touch to make sure you’re the first to learn more about this upgraded analytics solution!