A lot of my client use Google Analytics on their websites.
This is a helpful part of my SEO package that allows visits to the website to be tracked and provides information about where the website visits come from, how long users look at pages, which pages and a whole heap of other clever stuff. Unfortunately, since the introduction of GDPR a few years ago, the data collection is now reliant on the user approving the use of cookies to ensure the data is tracked. However, I still think it can provide a valuable insight into how your website is performing and is crucial if you are paying for Google Adwords advertising.
Changes ahead
The powers that be at Google have decided to introduce Google Analytics 4 stating it is ‘The next generation of Google Analytics’ and ‘The future of measurement‘. So rather than having websites and apps as seperate entities, GA4 now combines the data and uses ‘events’ rather than session-based data. It is also offering cookieless measurement (to help with the GDPR issues mentioned above) and offers key objectives to be set up for website/app owners.
But the critical part of the information is that the current tracking code on most websites will stop collecting any data on 1 July 2023. So it is imperative, that if you want to continue gathering data, you must switch to the new GA4 tracking code before this deadline. The two systems will not flow into one another and you will need to manually make changes to your website.
Google also states that there will come a period in the future where the Universal Analytics data (everything collected up to the point of changing to GA4) will be deleted and so we are encouraged to download/export all previous data in order to maintain records.
What should you do?
If you already access your Google Analytics acount, when you login, you should see a prompt at the top of the page which will talk you through how to set up the new GA4 property. Once you have added the new property in your Analytics account, you then need to grab the new code and add that to your website. However, if you have employed a developer to set this up for you previously it may be sensible to get them to do this bit for you if you’re not sure. Read Google’s instructions here
I will be contacting my clients and take care of this for them for a minimal fee but I’m just working on the details of the plan currently!
Summary
So please ensure that you have switched to using the new GA4 code and account by 1 July 2023 or else your analytics data will no longer be collected!
