You Ask, I Answer: Google Analytics 4 Up and Running?

In today's episode, Andrew asks, Hi Chris, dare I ask about Google Analytics 4. Do you think people are making necessary effort to get up and running? Nope. No, they're not. And this is going to come back to people in a couple different ways.

The first and most obvious one is yes, as of July 1, which is as I record this like 26 days away. There will be a whole bunch of websites who will suddenly no longer have current data, right? They'll go into their Google Analytics and go, huh? There's there's no inf new information after June 30th. Like, yep.

Google's been telling you for two and a half years that GA4 is the way to go. That's the first and most obvious thing. Hey, things just stopped working. I was talking to my martial arts teacher about that the other day. Um I moved his account over two years ago because that's the job of a student is to help their teacher.

Um second impact you're going to see is data. It's not asynchronization, but is you your data's going to drift out of sync. And here's why. When you turn on Google Analytics 4, it does not bring over your old data. Your old data stays in the old system.

And Google has said as of January 1, 2024, they may, they may turn off Universal Analytics entirely. Well, that's kind of problematic if you need back data and you just turned on Google Analytics 4, you know, today or yesterday. You have year over year data beginning today, right? The day you turn it on is the day, the first day next year you will have year over year data. So you would have to rely on your universal analytics data until you that point.

Well, that could be kind of problematic, right? Suppose it's June 4th, 2024, and you want to do year over year, and Google deleted it all, right? That that's kind of a problem. This is even going to bite people in fourth quarter, third and fourth quarter of this year, when again, they go to do their year over year, you know, strategic marketing planning. Everybody huddles up in a conference room after Labor Day and is like, okay, let's plan our marketing for the next year.

Oh, let's look at our back our last year's worth of data. You go into Google Analytics 4 and go, oh, we only have three months of data. And then you're like, well, maybe we can use the universal analytics data, but then how do we merge this all together? So people are going to have to get real good at data blending. Um, export of your old data, data blending and stuff like that.

And you know, there's basic ways to do that, like you know, just doing an Excel spreadsheets, but that's really inefficient, and it makes it very difficult to ask questions of your data. So there's going to be a lot of uh challenges for companies in that regard. And then the third area, and this is something we talked about recently on the Trust Insights uh live stream, is regulatory for highly regulated industries that are required to keep data for seven years or whatever, it's not gonna go over real well when Google just deletes all that data in 2024, right? So companies would need to download their data and pre in a format that auditors will accept uh and be able to present it to auditors in some fashion or form and retain it for a few years until they they've retained it for the conditions of the audit. And so, yeah, people are not making the S necessarily after get up and running.

And even in the places where companies have, they've not done a good job of it. Um, I was working uh in one client's instance recently, and uh and it was a mess. It was a mess. I saw I saw this this one example. I'm not gonna uh give in enough details to out anyone here, but whoever had done it in the past hadn't clearly did not have experience with GA4 and didn't understand the new event model and didn't understand how to think about the way GA4 stores data, and so they they created a bunch of stuff that was largely unnecessary and really inefficient and difficult to use.

So, no, people are are not ready, which is unfortunate because they've had it over years since Google started warning people to get ready, and it's going to be very difficult to fix this after the fact. So that's the answer to that question. Now, shameless plug time. If you need help getting your GA4 set up, go to trustinsights.ai slash contact and let us know. We will fix it for you.

It will not be cheap because as you can imagine, our dance card is getting pretty full. But if you are in a bind and and you just want it done, let us know. Thanks for the question, and uh talk to you next time. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.