2023 is the year that Google’s Universal Analytics goes dark.
Universal Analytics is the free version of Google Analytics that nearly everyone has used since 2012. We’ll refer to it as UA during the rest of this article. It’s being replaced by a new version called Google Analytics 4 and it’s important to know what to expect during 2023 so you can avoid serious disruptions to your marketing and business.
On July 1, UA will stop collecting data and on December 31, your entire data history will no longer be available.
Every visit to your site, every product purchase and every goal conversion will be gone. It will not be possible to move your UA data into GA4. You will only be able to look back as far as the date your GA4 property was created.
Your UI data is likely too big to export to a spreadsheet.
And unless you have an analytics 360 subscription, which costs $50,000 or more, there is no easy way to copy your UA data to a database like Google BigQuery. And even if you could, accessing your data in BigQuery requires complex SQL statements that few marketers are familiar with.
We know how serious this is for marketers. So we created a solution to help you save your UI data before it’s lost forever.
Our new Analytics integration service brings all of your historical UI data and new GA four data together in a unified, always-current dataset you can use to measure long-term trends, and new insights and track overall marketing performance. Here’s what the service includes:
- A centralized marketing analytics data hub that includes your GA4 and UA data;
- Premium Looker studio data visualization dashboards that allow you to answer virtually any question you can imagine.
- Our analytics copilot feature that automatically alerts you to trends, issues, and opportunities in your marketing data.
- Access to our private automation and analytics community where you can sharpen your analytic skills and engage with other marketing peers and business owners.
Universal Analytics will sunset this year. The question is wether your organization will go dark when that happens.
This affects virtually every website in America in the world. So you can expect the demand for this service to surge. There will not be enough providers to support the need. So don’t risk waiting!