If your company relies on Google Analytics, a critical deadline is approaching: On July 1, 2024, Google will delete all data in standard Universal Analytics (UA) properties.
That goes even for companies that transitioned from UA to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) before Google officially stopped collecting data via UA in July 2023. So while GA4 may be collecting your current data, if you still have any historical data in Universal Analytics properties, that data will no longer be accessible via the user interface and API as of July 1, 2024—it will be lost and gone forever unless you take action now.
Gupta Media’s Strategy & Analytics team has designed a comprehensive approach that will allow you to export the Universal Analytics data that matters most. By connecting directly to the Google Analytics API, we're able to export a set of key reports that our experts have identified as essential for archiving.
Read on to learn more, or fill out the form below to connect with an S&A representative, get a quote and get started.
Archiving UA data is important even if you’re already tracking your current data in GA4—because with any question that you want to ask of your Google Analytics data, you’ll likely need to use historical data for comparison, benchmarking, and multi-year trend analysis. Your GA4 data only goes back to the point in time when your GA4 property was set up. Since GA4 didn’t debut until 2020, that means you’ll have access to no more than four years of GA4 data—and for many companies, significantly less.
By archiving your UA data now, you can preserve the metrics that matter most. Even if you’re not yet prepared to integrate the historical data into your current tech stack, we recommend exporting and saving the data in your UA properties so that it can be integrated in the future.
Introducing: Gupta Media’s UA Data Retention Solution
One of Google’s recommended solutions is to manually export individual reports from the Universal Analytics interface to CSV or Google Sheets. However, this method has many limitations—including the number of dimensions and number of rows that can be exported—making for a time-consuming and incomplete process.
Generating a thorough data archive requires deep expertise in the architecture of Universal Analytics. As anyone who has used it knows, UA is a sprawling interface. It tracks session-level, user-level, event-level, and product-level data. Its different metrics aren’t always compatible with each other. That means there isn’t a single UA database you can download to capture everything—instead, you’d need to download many different reports, corresponding with different queries. For companies with multiple UA properties, this process would need to be repeated for each UA implementation—a procedure that could take weeks to design, implement, and validate.
To simplify the UA archiving process, Gupta Media has designed an approach that allows us to help you retain comprehensive, high quality data. Designed by the UA experts on our Strategy & Analytics team, this method circumvents many of the limitations that Google’s recommended solutions introduce into the archiving process.
For instance: Google Analytics data often uses sampling—machine-modeled forecasting, based on your actual data—to paint a more complete picture. But the sampled data can vary, based on the report and the time frames selected. And because of that inconsistency, baking the sampled data into your archival reports can diminish overall reporting quality. That’s why our solution is designed to avoid sampling as much as possible, to deliver the highest quality, most consistent archive available. And our custom-curated reports, developed over months of testing, provide extensive coverage and save you time.
We designed our archiving solution to solve for queries that combine different metrics across UA properties. For instance, if you ever want to be able to answer these questions, you should be downloading your UA archive now:
- What is the Average Session Duration and Session Conversion Rate by Age & Gender?
- What are the Top 10 US states in Revenue? What is the AOV in each state?
- What are the Top 10 Browsers & Operating Systems by Session volume, and what are the average pageviews per session for each?
- What are the Top 20 Products purchased by Revenue?
- What are the bounce rates for paid media landing pages with over 5,000 sessions?
How It Works
Our approach is designed to make the process of saving Universal Analytics data very simple. By completing just three short steps, we’ll deliver a comprehensive UA archive:
- Tell us the Universal Analytics properties you want data to be retained for.
- Grant Gupta Media access to those properties.
- Receive your data in any of the following methods:
- Computer File Transfer Service: files can be transferred via a computer file transfer service such as WeTransfer.
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP): files can be transferred via server to GCP Cloud Storage.
- Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP): files can be transferred via SFTP.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): files can be transferred via server to AWS Bucket.
- Other: If there’s a different way you would like to receive your files, let us know!
