You may already be aware of this, but just to remind you Google is moving away from the current version of Google Analytics, also called Universal Analytics (UA or GA3) to an upgraded version called Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Google is going to sunset Universal Analytics (the free version) on July 1, 2023, and Universal Analytics 360 (the paid version) on October 1, 2023.
There have been updates to Google Analytics before, but this update is pretty significant. Some features that we all know in UA have been removed from GA4 and some new features have been added in their place.
This article is specifically for PPC marketers relying on GA as a platform for measurement and performance.
We also spoke to two of the top experts in the analytics space, Brie Anderson and Timothy Jensen on PPC Town Hall about the migration to GA4. You can watch the full episode below:
Why does Google want you to migrate to GA4?
In an earlier episode of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to Janet Driscoll Miller and Charles Farina on this topic. Here’s the full episode:
Janet Driscoll Miller shares 2 reasons for this migration.
Google wants to bring you closer to measuring your revenue and KPIs in GA4. And the way they’ve set up the navigation and features in GA4 makes that convenient for the users.
Google wants to move away from the privacy issues and cookie-based tracking that existed in the past. As a result, they’ve added more privacy-focused features in GA4.
Notably, one of the features is you can set a data retention period. By default, it is set to 2 months. But you can change it to 14 months if you want.
And the other improvement in GA4’s data tracking is that, in the current Universal Analytics, if a user is on a session and it turns to midnight at whatever time zone you set your analytics to, if they are still on your site when it turns to 12:00 A.M. moving into the next day, Universal Analytics considers it as a new session.
So that’s treated as two sessions instead of one. Whereas in GA4, it’s considered as one continuous session. This may affect you especially if you’re a global company.
That’s why the sooner you migrate to GA4, the more accurate your year-over-year data is going to be.
Charles Farina says that Google is rebuilding GA4 from the ground up to move away from their old — to be more precise — a 15-year old code base which dates back to the days when they acquired Urchin, which later became the Google Analytics tool that we know now.
How is Google Analytics 4 better than Universal Analytics for PPC marketers?
Google Analytics is over 15 years old, and some of the ways it works haven’t changed all these years. An example of that is conversion tracking. And conversions, or what we call goals in UA are not so effective.
A conversion in UA is a sessionized metric, which means it can only count once per session. So if you have an ecommerce purchase and you mark that as a goal in UA, and someone purchased twice in that visit, UA only counts it once.
In GA4, Google has completely rebuilt conversion tracking. And the conversions that you set up are now flexible. So what that means is for the first time, you can set up seasonal or campaign-based goals or conversions.
Another example is that if you have, say a ‘back-to-school’ campaign and you have a unique kind of form or action based on that, you can set that as a conversion temporarily. And then when the campaign is over, you can archive it and the data still stays there and frees up a new conversion window.
Charles Farina adds,
“You can create conversions that were never possible before in Universal Analytics. So these conversions were, pretty basic or dumb. You could only set them up off of a page or a particular event. You couldn’t combine different conditions together.”
What should PPC marketers do to prepare for Google Analytics 4 migration?
We recommend that you start your GA4 migration immediately if you haven’t done so already, because, like all things Google Analytics, it will only start tracking and recording your data after you create that property. It does not have a look-back window.
And on a side note, Google says you’ll be able to access your historical UA data for only six months after the July 1, 2023 deadline, which means that starting from January 1, 2024, your UA data won’t be available.
If you want to smoothly migrate from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, here are a couple of step-by-step guides for you.
Once you migrate to GA4, you need to connect that property to Google Ads. In this process, your conversions and audiences in Universal Analytics are not going to survive the migration.
You can make better use of your audiences in Google Analytics 4
Google has taken the feature of analyzing audiences from the paid version, Google Analytics 360, and added it to GA4.
Some experts suggest you should save your older UA data when you migrate to GA4 as you’re going to lose it, as mentioned above, for the purpose of data forecasting or historical trend analysis later on. Here’s how you can save your historical UA data.
How to export and save your older Universal Analytics data?
As far as we know, there are 3 methods to export and save your older UA data.
Method 1:
You can just go into the Google Analytics interface and download CSVs of the time periods you need. But this is cumbersome and time-consuming and hence we don’t recommend this.
Method 2:
If you have knowledge of web development or have access to a developer, you can use the Google Analytics Reporting API to access older report data that you need.
Method 3:
If you don’t know how to use the API or don’t have access to a web developer, no problem. There’s a great Google Analytics plugin/add-on for Google Sheets. And you can very easily access the API through that add-on and create and export reports in whatever dimensions you want.
“I recommend that you export and save 3 to 5 years of data because COVID-19 really threw off what normalcy looked like in analytics. And so for many of our clients, we’ve been going back at least 2 or 3 years to do that comparison to really look at what normal used to look like.”
“So I definitely would say think about the ranges you need and the cadence at which you want to pull reports and what type of reports you access regularly. And you’ve got to really be thoughtful about what you need access to so you can pull down the raw data and then you can do whatever you want with it in Google Sheets or Data Studio, but you’ve at least got the raw data.”
But before you do any old data backup, ensure that your GA4 migration is successful.
Does Google Analytics 4 connect with the popular ecommerce platforms?
At the time of writing this article, September 2022, there was no official Shopify integration with Google Analytics 4. But to help fill in the gap, we found a free workaround.
But WooCommerce has released their official GA4 integration and you can find their step-by-step guide here.
Making the shift
Change is hard. And since this is a forced migration by Google, we have no choice but to make the shift.
It may not be comfortable initially to navigate and get used to the new way of measurement, but Google claims that GA4 is fully equipped to support your measurement needs today and into the future.
We hope the points we laid out above help you smoothly sail into the new world of measurement and performance.
But if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Charles Farina on Twitter at @CharlesFarina or email Janet Driscoll Miller at jmiller[at]marketing-mojo.com.
In less than a year, starting July 2023, Universal Analytics (UA) from Google will stop recording new data. So if you haven’t already done so, you should immediately use the upgrade assistant from Google to create a new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property.
Even if you do nothing else, this ensures that you start collecting data now, which will help you with those year-over-year reports that someone in your team will invariably ask for next year.
If you’re a PPC marketer and would like to learn how to migrate to Google Analytics 4 and what changed in GA4 compared to UA for PPC, watch the video below where I spoke to two of the top Google Analytics experts, Janet Driscoll Miller and Charles Farina on PPC Town Hall:
Get actionable PPC tips, strategies, and tactics from industry experts twice a month.
But after setting up GA4 and exploring the reports, one of the first things many advertisers will notice is that the automatic migration tool hasn’t brought along their goals which makes the data much less helpful in optimizing online ads.
Adding conversions or goals back into GA4 should be one of the first steps after migrating, but because GA4 works very differently from UA, it can seem tricky and get skipped over.
So in this post, we’ll explain first why Google has made it more complicated and then show you how to get things back the way you want them with minimal effort and without needing an engineer’s help.
Why did pageview conversions go missing in Google Analytics 4?
The reason the pageview conversions from a migrated UA property didn’t cleanly make it over to GA4 stems from the fact that GA4 works differently from UA. GA4 is an event-centric rather than a pageview-centric measurement tool.
In UA, every page load was considered a visit and got counted in all the standard reports. In GA4, page loads are still tracked but they’ve been relegated to a supporting role in favor of events.
Tracking events rather than pageviews makes sense on the modern web because many web pages are interactive and don’t reload when the user interacts with them.
Think of Gmail, for example… you can click around the interface to see different emails and reply to them without causing a single page to reload. GA4 can measure all this engagement through events rather than relying on page loads.
But what if your conversions are based on pageviews, like when a user gets to a ‘thank you’ page after submitting a lead form or an order confirmation page after their purchase? Does that mean you can no longer track these pageview-based events as conversions in GA4?
Luckily, you still can, and it’s relatively easy, so let’s look at the steps to add pageview-driven conversions in a GA4 property.
Step 1: Enable Enhanced Measurement
While you could get overly technical and ask the webmaster or person who manages Google Tag Manager to create a special event when a user comes to the page associated with a conversion, you can also do it much more simply.
GA4 already tracks certain events out of the box, and pageviews are one of these automatically tracked events that users get when they enable enhanced measurement by turning it on with a single switch in the admin settings.
Go to the ‘Data Streams’ section of the admin settings in GA4:
Then toggle the switch to enable enhanced measurement:
Step 2: Create an event for a view of a specific page
Of course, we don’t want to measure every page view as a conversion so we need to narrow it down and create an event for the page we want to track as a goal or conversion.
Go to the ‘Events’ page and click the button to create a new event:
For the new event, set the event_name equal to‘ page_view’ and for the page_location parameter, enter the condition that will match it to the desired conversion page. In our example, we’re matching URLs that end with a particular text:
If you can’t remember what pageview should be tracked as a goal, simply head back to your old UA profile (which you should not have deleted when you migrated to GA4) and look at the details for the goals you’d like to bring into GA4:
In the old UA account, we tracked a conversion whenever the destination URL equaled a particular text. We’re taking that string of text and using it to create an equivalent event-based conversion in GA4.
Notice the string we’re pointing to in UA below is the same text we entered for our custom event in the GA4 screenshots above in step 2:
Step 3: Turn the new event into a Conversion
The final step is to toggle your new event to be counted as a conversion. This toggle is available on the configuration page for events, where you’ll end up right after creating the new event in step 2, detailed above.
Step 4: Wait for data
Note that data for the new event will only start to collect after you create it. GA4 will not go back and retroactively find instances of that event. And similarly, GA4 will only count an event as a conversion from the moment you toggle it to be counted as a conversion.
So after a few hours, assuming you’ve had conversions happening on your site, return to GA4 and you should see some numbers for your new event and pageview-based conversion.
Conclusion
That’s it… relatively straightforward once you know how GA4 differs from UA. Of course, we wish we didn’t have to learn a whole new way of working with Google Analytics but that’s outside Optmyzr’s control.
We hope our guide helped make it easier to get your goals back into your GA data so you can start getting some real value out of GA4.
Get actionable PPC tips, strategies, and tactics from industry experts to your inbox once a month.
You may already be aware of this, but just to remind you Google is moving away from the current version of Google Analytics, also called Universal Analytics (UA or GA3) to an upgraded version called Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Google is going to sunset Universal Analytics (the free version) on July 1, 2023, and Universal Analytics 360 (the paid version) on October 1, 2023.
There have been updates to Google Analytics before, but this update is pretty significant. Some features that we all know in UA have been removed from GA4 and some new features have been added in their place.
This article is specifically for PPC marketers relying on GA as a platform for measurement and performance.
We also spoke to two of the top experts in the analytics space, Brie Anderson and Timothy Jensen on PPC Town Hall about the migration to GA4. You can watch the full episode below:
Why does Google want you to migrate to GA4?
In an earlier episode of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to Janet Driscoll Miller and Charles Farina on this topic. Here’s the full episode:
Janet Driscoll Miller shares 2 reasons for this migration.
Google wants to bring you closer to measuring your revenue and KPIs in GA4. And the way they’ve set up the navigation and features in GA4 makes that convenient for the users.
Google wants to move away from the privacy issues and cookie-based tracking that existed in the past. As a result, they’ve added more privacy-focused features in GA4.
Notably, one of the features is you can set a data retention period. By default, it is set to 2 months. But you can change it to 14 months if you want.
And the other improvement in GA4’s data tracking is that, in the current Universal Analytics, if a user is on a session and it turns to midnight at whatever time zone you set your analytics to, if they are still on your site when it turns to 12:00 A.M. moving into the next day, Universal Analytics considers it as a new session.
So that’s treated as two sessions instead of one. Whereas in GA4, it’s considered as one continuous session. This may affect you especially if you’re a global company.
That’s why the sooner you migrate to GA4, the more accurate your year-over-year data is going to be.
Charles Farina says that Google is rebuilding GA4 from the ground up to move away from their old — to be more precise — a 15-year old code base which dates back to the days when they acquired Urchin, which later became the Google Analytics tool that we know now.
How is Google Analytics 4 better than Universal Analytics for PPC marketers?
Google Analytics is over 15 years old, and some of the ways it works haven’t changed all these years. An example of that is conversion tracking. And conversions, or what we call goals in UA are not so effective.
A conversion in UA is a sessionized metric, which means it can only count once per session. So if you have an ecommerce purchase and you mark that as a goal in UA, and someone purchased twice in that visit, UA only counts it once.
In GA4, Google has completely rebuilt conversion tracking. And the conversions that you set up are now flexible. So what that means is for the first time, you can set up seasonal or campaign-based goals or conversions.
Another example is that if you have, say a ‘back-to-school’ campaign and you have a unique kind of form or action based on that, you can set that as a conversion temporarily. And then when the campaign is over, you can archive it and the data still stays there and frees up a new conversion window.
Charles Farina adds,
“You can create conversions that were never possible before in Universal Analytics. So these conversions were, pretty basic or dumb. You could only set them up off of a page or a particular event. You couldn’t combine different conditions together.”
What should PPC marketers do to prepare for Google Analytics 4 migration?
We recommend that you start your GA4 migration immediately if you haven’t done so already, because, like all things Google Analytics, it will only start tracking and recording your data after you create that property. It does not have a look-back window.
And on a side note, Google says you’ll be able to access your historical UA data for only six months after the July 1, 2023 deadline, which means that starting from January 1, 2024, your UA data won’t be available.
If you want to smoothly migrate from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, here are a couple of step-by-step guides for you.
Once you migrate to GA4, you need to connect that property to Google Ads. In this process, your conversions and audiences in Universal Analytics are not going to survive the migration.
You can make better use of your audiences in Google Analytics 4
Google has taken the feature of analyzing audiences from the paid version, Google Analytics 360, and added it to GA4.
Some experts suggest you should save your older UA data when you migrate to GA4 as you’re going to lose it, as mentioned above, for the purpose of data forecasting or historical trend analysis later on. Here’s how you can save your historical UA data.
How to export and save your older Universal Analytics data?
As far as we know, there are 3 methods to export and save your older UA data.
Method 1:
You can just go into the Google Analytics interface and download CSVs of the time periods you need. But this is cumbersome and time-consuming and hence we don’t recommend this.
Method 2:
If you have knowledge of web development or have access to a developer, you can use the Google Analytics Reporting API to access older report data that you need.
Method 3:
If you don’t know how to use the API or don’t have access to a web developer, no problem. There’s a great Google Analytics plugin/add-on for Google Sheets. And you can very easily access the API through that add-on and create and export reports in whatever dimensions you want.
“I recommend that you export and save 3 to 5 years of data because COVID-19 really threw off what normalcy looked like in analytics. And so for many of our clients, we’ve been going back at least 2 or 3 years to do that comparison to really look at what normal used to look like.”
“So I definitely would say think about the ranges you need and the cadence at which you want to pull reports and what type of reports you access regularly. And you’ve got to really be thoughtful about what you need access to so you can pull down the raw data and then you can do whatever you want with it in Google Sheets or Data Studio, but you’ve at least got the raw data.”
But before you do any old data backup, ensure that your GA4 migration is successful.
Does Google Analytics 4 connect with the popular ecommerce platforms?
At the time of writing this article, September 2022, there was no official Shopify integration with Google Analytics 4. But to help fill in the gap, we found a free workaround.
But WooCommerce has released their official GA4 integration and you can find their step-by-step guide here.
Making the shift
Change is hard. And since this is a forced migration by Google, we have no choice but to make the shift.
It may not be comfortable initially to navigate and get used to the new way of measurement, but Google claims that GA4 is fully equipped to support your measurement needs today and into the future.
We hope the points we laid out above help you smoothly sail into the new world of measurement and performance.
But if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Charles Farina on Twitter at @CharlesFarina or email Janet Driscoll Miller at jmiller[at]marketing-mojo.com.
In less than a year, starting July 2023, Universal Analytics (UA) from Google will stop recording new data. So if you haven’t already done so, you should immediately use the upgrade assistant from Google to create a new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property.
Even if you do nothing else, this ensures that you start collecting data now, which will help you with those year-over-year reports that someone in your team will invariably ask for next year.
If you’re a PPC marketer and would like to learn how to migrate to Google Analytics 4 and what changed in GA4 compared to UA for PPC, watch the video below where I spoke to two of the top Google Analytics experts, Janet Driscoll Miller and Charles Farina on PPC Town Hall:
Get actionable PPC tips, strategies, and tactics from industry experts twice a month.
But after setting up GA4 and exploring the reports, one of the first things many advertisers will notice is that the automatic migration tool hasn’t brought along their goals which makes the data much less helpful in optimizing online ads.
Adding conversions or goals back into GA4 should be one of the first steps after migrating, but because GA4 works very differently from UA, it can seem tricky and get skipped over.
So in this post, we’ll explain first why Google has made it more complicated and then show you how to get things back the way you want them with minimal effort and without needing an engineer’s help.
Why did pageview conversions go missing in Google Analytics 4?
The reason the pageview conversions from a migrated UA property didn’t cleanly make it over to GA4 stems from the fact that GA4 works differently from UA. GA4 is an event-centric rather than a pageview-centric measurement tool.
In UA, every page load was considered a visit and got counted in all the standard reports. In GA4, page loads are still tracked but they’ve been relegated to a supporting role in favor of events.
Tracking events rather than pageviews makes sense on the modern web because many web pages are interactive and don’t reload when the user interacts with them.
Think of Gmail, for example… you can click around the interface to see different emails and reply to them without causing a single page to reload. GA4 can measure all this engagement through events rather than relying on page loads.
But what if your conversions are based on pageviews, like when a user gets to a ‘thank you’ page after submitting a lead form or an order confirmation page after their purchase? Does that mean you can no longer track these pageview-based events as conversions in GA4?
Luckily, you still can, and it’s relatively easy, so let’s look at the steps to add pageview-driven conversions in a GA4 property.
Step 1: Enable Enhanced Measurement
While you could get overly technical and ask the webmaster or person who manages Google Tag Manager to create a special event when a user comes to the page associated with a conversion, you can also do it much more simply.
GA4 already tracks certain events out of the box, and pageviews are one of these automatically tracked events that users get when they enable enhanced measurement by turning it on with a single switch in the admin settings.
Go to the ‘Data Streams’ section of the admin settings in GA4:
Then toggle the switch to enable enhanced measurement:
Step 2: Create an event for a view of a specific page
Of course, we don’t want to measure every page view as a conversion so we need to narrow it down and create an event for the page we want to track as a goal or conversion.
Go to the ‘Events’ page and click the button to create a new event:
For the new event, set the event_name equal to‘ page_view’ and for the page_location parameter, enter the condition that will match it to the desired conversion page. In our example, we’re matching URLs that end with a particular text:
If you can’t remember what pageview should be tracked as a goal, simply head back to your old UA profile (which you should not have deleted when you migrated to GA4) and look at the details for the goals you’d like to bring into GA4:
In the old UA account, we tracked a conversion whenever the destination URL equaled a particular text. We’re taking that string of text and using it to create an equivalent event-based conversion in GA4.
Notice the string we’re pointing to in UA below is the same text we entered for our custom event in the GA4 screenshots above in step 2:
Step 3: Turn the new event into a Conversion
The final step is to toggle your new event to be counted as a conversion. This toggle is available on the configuration page for events, where you’ll end up right after creating the new event in step 2, detailed above.
Step 4: Wait for data
Note that data for the new event will only start to collect after you create it. GA4 will not go back and retroactively find instances of that event. And similarly, GA4 will only count an event as a conversion from the moment you toggle it to be counted as a conversion.
So after a few hours, assuming you’ve had conversions happening on your site, return to GA4 and you should see some numbers for your new event and pageview-based conversion.
Conclusion
That’s it… relatively straightforward once you know how GA4 differs from UA. Of course, we wish we didn’t have to learn a whole new way of working with Google Analytics but that’s outside Optmyzr’s control.
We hope our guide helped make it easier to get your goals back into your GA data so you can start getting some real value out of GA4.
Get actionable PPC tips, strategies, and tactics from industry experts to your inbox once a month.
