Google is shutting down its existing analytics solution

Google will introduce a new generation of Analytics tracking tool. like the internet company Now in a blog post It announced that Universal Analytics – the current generation of analytics – will be discontinued next year. Then the latest version of Analytics 4, which was introduced by Google about two and a half years ago, is supported.

According to Russell Ketchum, product management at Google Analytics, Analytics 4 aims to replace Universal Analytics “soon with an outdated measurement methodology.” The methods were then “developed for a generation of well-established online measurement methods in the desktop web, in independent sessions and in more easily observable data than cookies.”

Legacy analytics settings will no longer provide data from summer 2023

Google Analytics reports and data for websites or apps are included in what are called properties. According to Google, all standard Universal Analytics sites should not be able to process new results from July 1, 2023. For the recently launched Analytics 360, a variant of Analytics with more comprehensive reporting, the processing time for new results ends in October 1, 2023. Previously processed data will be stored in Universal Analytics for at least six months after the above closing dates.

The old properties should now be migrated to the new analyses. Namely, if the site was created before October 14, 2020, it will likely remain a Universal Analytics site, and the report settings created after that date will most likely be already Google Analytics 4 sites. Anyone who wants to check what is currently being used can do so with manual. There are detailed instructions on how the migration works Google on help page.

Retailers and advertisers should make the change ASAP — although there is still a good year to go. So they can already start learning about the new interface and tracking metrics relevant to the new methodology. Google states that they can also create a data basis for future assessments.

Privacy control and analysis across platforms

The issue of data protection is a major reason for the change: the new variant aims to enable more detailed controls over data collection and use. For example, IP addresses are no longer stored and cookies are not relied solely on collecting data – instead, an event-based data basis is used for user-centric measurements. Google promises, “With new country-level privacy controls, you can manage and reduce a user-level set of data — such as cookies and metadata — while maintaining important scaling capabilities.”

In addition to data protection tweaks, Analytics 4 should have functionality to increase sales and conversions. The tool can work across platforms, which means that customer interaction can be assessed both online and offline – among other things, machine learning is used for this. The idea is that users can get a “full overview of the customer lifecycle”.