Your Universal Analytics data will be deleted in July
During the week of July 1, 2024 you will permanently lose access to all of your historical Universal Analytics data.
If you’re responsible for data in an arts or cultural organisation, keep reading to find out what you need to do.
There’s no need to panic - you switched over to Google Analytics 4 ages ago, right? It does, however, raise some important considerations:
How often do you compare long-term website performance over multiple years?
Do you have any active funding or partner commitments that require you to report on website activity from a period prior to when your GA4 data started recording?
Is your Google Analytics 4 implementation doing everything you need it to do?
Universal Analytics stopped collecting data back in July 2023, so this is the final stage of Google’s gradual switchover to GA4.
Here’s their official line:
Starting the week of July 1, 2024: You won't be able to access any Universal Analytics properties or the API (not even with read-only access), and all data will be deleted.
In other words, all data from before the day you got GA4 up and running is going to be lost.
You can read more from Google here.
If you don’t need your old UA data, then there’s nothing to worry about.
However, if you ever find yourself needing to reference your historical analytics data, now is the time to act so that you don’t lose it all.
Do you really need all that data?
There are various ways to export and retain data, depending on what you want to do with it and your level of technical expertise.
Questions to ask yourself:
Do you really need all the data, or just some specifics?
What are the key metrics you frequently refer to? Write down the ones that matter - the ones you always check in your reports.
Do you need to be able to drill down into the data, using an interface similar to Google Analytics?
What’s your budget for securing the data? This will determine the sophistication of your approach, and whether you’re going to DIY it or get someone like us to help out.
There’s a good chance you might want to refer back to specific, common metrics over time. Things like:
Sessions
Page views
Users and new users
Acquisition sources, e.g. paid vs organic, social platforms
Locations
Mobile vs desktop
You might even want to segment that by website section or specific pages (e.g. to see how your blog has grown over time relative to the rest of the site). On the other hand, you probably won’t need to drill down into individual sessions to examine visitor behaviour in fine detail, given the age of the data.
You know what is important to your goals, and it’ll be slightly different for every organisation.
How to save your data
There are several solutions, depending on your technical ability and/or budget. Remember: these will only work if used before the deadline.
Quick exports
The simple solution is to manually export reports for each of the metrics that matter.
For example, you could go to the Audiences report, set up the date range and charts appropriately, then click the Export button up the top.
This exports the report as it is currently displayed to your chosen format.
The format you choose is important:
PDF saves a visual representation of the report, with chart and table. Useful at-a-glance, but you can’t do anything further with the data while it’s trapped inside the PDF.
Google Sheets, Excel and CSV export the raw data, which can then be imported into a spreadsheet. You’ll have to create your own charts and analysis, but for a bit more work you get something that is far more useful.
We recommend the latter option. You don’t have to do anything with the data right away, but you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you’ve got it secured should you need it in the future.
A drawback of this approach is that you still need to manually go through each report in Universal Analytics, set up the date range as needed, and create the export. It’s a very manual process which will take some time. There’s also a limit to how much data can be exported with this technique of 5,000 rows per export.
There’s also a small risk that you might miss something, and only realise that you’re missing important data once the deadline has passed. That’s why it’s important to make a comprehensive list of everything you want to keep.
Automated spreadsheet export
There’s a more automated approach, which is using the Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on for Google Sheets. Google has full instructions here, which boil down to:
Install the plugin
Copy the spreadsheet template
Update the View ID and date ranges
Run the report
As long as you know what you’re doing, this will provide a more comprehensive export of data. And, perhaps crucially, this approach won’t cost you anything other than your time.
Again, you’ll need to create your own dashboards and reports from the exported data, but you’ll know it’s all there.
Use the UA API
There’s a third option, which is to use the Google Analytics Reporting API to transfer all of your data to Cloud storage.
From there you can link it to a Looker Studio dashboard - you can even look at recreating the Universal Analytics interface experience, if that’s your sort of thing.
This will deliver the closest experience to actually using the old Google Analytics but is much more complex to set up. It’s worth asking yourself whether you really need this level of granularity in your archival data.
Need some help?
If you’re looking for advice or just need someone to take care of this for you, get in touch.
We’ve implemented sophisticated Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 setups for a huge number of arts and cultural organisations over the last decade and understand what types of data are useful to you.
