John Readman is the CEO of ASK BOSCO, which gives online retailers and marketing agencies the power of AI predictive marketing analytics.
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July 1, 2024, will mark a pivotal day in the world of data analytics, reporting and storage. From then on, businesses will no longer be able to access Google Universal Analytics, and all historical data will subsequently be deleted.
The sunsetting of Universal Analytics isn’t a surprise, with Google turning off the ability to track data from Universal Analytics in June 2023 and announcing that companies should migrate to Google Analytics 4. However, despite being sign-posted for over a year, many organizations fail to understand the gravity of this switchover and its implications for data storage, analysis and reporting.
What Does Sunsetting Universal Analytics And Moving To GA4 Mean For My Data?
Universal Analytics, also known as Google Analytics, was released back in 2013. Since then, Google’s web analytics technologies have risen to become the widest-used traffic analysis tools in the world, providing businesses with a comprehensive method of monitoring traffic and conducting in-depth data investigations.
Universal Analytics offered an extensive level of data capture and storage. In May 2018, Google introduced data retention controls in response to GDPR regulations. Users could select when they would like their data to expire (spanning 14, 26, 38 or 50 months), or opt for their data to never expire. This latter option meant that organizations could access and examine upwards of a decade of historical data on their business operations within Universal Analytics.
The shift to GA4 will put an end to this, with data retention capping at 14 months. A business that wants to examine data on a granular level from outside this period will only be able to do so in GA4 if they export the data. What’s more, Google Analytics 4 will only record data from the day that a company sets up and activates the platform.
This significant loss of data could be detrimental to businesses, as they:
• Lose the ability to show growth over the years.
• Lose the ability to compare sales periods across several years.
• Are unable to use historical data to enable forecasting.
• Are unable to conduct media mix modeling (MMM) statistical analysis, reducing insight into the impact of various sales channels and strategies.
The data retention policies of GA4, limited to 14 months, eliminate the possibility of long-term comparison. While the GA4 Reports Snapshot does go back further, it doesn’t offer granular data; it is limited to top-level aggregated numbers.
While a business could trace trends over time, the lack of long-term data on the Explore page would leave them blind to why these patterns were occurring.
The impact of this will become apparent on September 1, 2024, 14 months from when tracking was disabled within Universal Analytics.
Why Is Google Shifting Its Data Policies?
If businesses want to save their historical data, they need to make use of the time before July 1 to export millions of rows of data into external databases. Cloud providers are the natural solution here, with large-scale cloud data warehousing providing the data architecture for storing years of historical data.
Understanding this need for external storage, Google’s new retention period in GA4 may align with its wider push of its Cloud Services. BigQuery, Google’s fully managed cloud data warehouse, is an apt solution for businesses looking to store their long-term data from UA. Additionally, BigQuery is accessible directly from the Admin panel of GA4, making it a natural choice to store data that sits outside of the 14 months’ data retention. Exporting and storing data in BigQuery is fairly economical, typically only costing businesses a few dollars each month.
Although this cost isn’t a large investment for a company, the sheer scale of Google’s control over the data market allows it to leverage its customer base. Across millions of customers, the movement to store historical data in BigQuery creates a lucrative new revenue stream for the tech giant. Added to this, exporting data to BigQuery and then making use of it requires knowledge and skills and maybe the added expense of a data analyst.
For businesses that want to retain access to potentially over a decade of historical data, actioning, downloading or exploring it as soon as possible is vital. Whether that’s with BigQuery or another data warehouse service is ultimately up to the customer.
So the question arises: Is it now time for online businesses to consider using third-party reporting tools outside of GA4—tools that can capture and store not only Google data but also data from other marketing platforms such as Meta and TikTok, providing a comprehensive view of all marketing efforts?
With one tactical shift, Google’s sunsetting of Universal Analytics has enhanced reliance on its wider cloud services and generated a new revenue stream.
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