Four Weeks Until the Old Analytics Stops

What happens on the first of July

The old version of Google Analytics stops processing new data.

Existing historical data remains accessible for a period afterwards, so nothing disappears that day, but nothing new arrives either.

A business that has not set up the replacement will have figures ending on the thirtieth of June and nothing after it.

The date has been published since March of last year, which means most people have known about it for fifteen months and a good number have done nothing.

The four things that matter

• The new property exists and is collecting.
• Conversions are set up in it.
• The history you want is exported.
• Somebody knows how to read it.

The first is not automatic even where a property was created for you. Google generated properties for many accounts, and a generated property with no tag actually installed collects nothing, which people discover in July.

Check it is collecting today

Which takes two minutes and is the item everything else depends on.

Open the new property, find the realtime report, and load your own site on a phone.

You should appear within a few seconds.

If you do not, the tag is not installed or not firing, and that is the whole of the problem to solve this week.

Do the same on two or three individual pages, since a tag can be present on the home page and missing elsewhere.

Pick the pages people actually arrive on rather than whichever three are quickest to open.

Everything else on this list is wasted if this one fails.

A worked example

A business had a new property created automatically the previous year and assumed the switch was handled.

Checking in late May, the property existed, the reports were empty, and no tag had ever been installed.

They had a fortnight of usable data by the deadline rather than a year of comparison.

Installing the tag took ten minutes once somebody looked.

The lesson was that an automatically created property is an empty container rather than a completed migration.

Anybody who has not personally seen data in theirs should check this week.

The comparison problem is unavoidable

Worth accepting now rather than discovering in August.

The new version counts things differently, so its figures will not match the old ones and cannot be joined into a continuous series.

That means the year-on-year comparisons you are used to will be broken for a year, whatever you do.

The remedy is to export the old figures into your own record so the comparison can be made by hand, roughly, rather than in either tool.

That is the subject of the next few days and it is the part with a deadline attached.

Nobody avoids this, so plan around it rather than for it.

Set up conversions before the deadline

Since a property collecting visits and nothing else is barely worth having.

The two or three that matter are a form submission, a telephone tap, and any booking or purchase.

Those need setting up explicitly in the new property, and they are the figures you will actually use.

Doing it before July means the count starts from a clean date rather than from whenever somebody gets round to it.

A month of conversion data before the switch is also the only chance to sanity-check the numbers against reality while the old ones still exist.

Do not attempt a perfect migration

Which is where businesses lose the four weeks.

Recreating every custom report, every segment, and every configuration is a large project and almost none of it will be used.

Get the collection working, set two or three conversions, and rebuild reports later as you actually need them.

A property collecting correctly with three conversions is a successful migration for a small business.

Anything beyond that can happen in August with no deadline pressure.

If you use something else as well

Worth noting, since some businesses have a second tool.

A hosting-level or privacy-focused analytics tool continues unaffected, and for some small businesses is genuinely sufficient on its own.

This is a reasonable moment to ask whether you need the more complicated one at all, given what you actually look at.

A business that checks four numbers a month may be better served by something simpler.

That decision is easier now than after investing a month in configuration.

Tell whoever reports on this

Since the discontinuity will otherwise arrive as a surprise in somebody else's report.

If a supplier, a colleague, or an accountant sees monthly figures, tell them now that the numbers change basis on the first of July and will not be comparable.

Otherwise August produces a report showing a fall that is entirely an artefact of the switch, and somebody spends a week investigating it.

Say what the old figure was for June and what the new one shows, so the step is documented rather than debated.

That one message prevents the most predictable confusion of the whole year.

The counter-case

Some businesses can let it lapse.

A business that has never once opened its analytics loses nothing at all by the switch, and should consider whether to bother replacing it.

Very small sites also have traffic too low for any of these figures to be meaningful month to month, which no amount of configuration changes.

And a business whose enquiries all arrive by telephone and referral is measuring something fairly peripheral either way, which the switch is a reasonable moment to notice.

Check it is collecting today, set two or three conversions, export what you want to keep, and stop there rather than rebuilding a year of configuration.

This week

1. Open the new property.
2. Watch realtime while loading your site.
3. Check two or three pages.
4. Install the tag if nothing appears.
5. Set up two or three conversions.
6. Plan the export for next week.
7. Do not rebuild every report.

Step two is the one item that cannot wait, since every other task on this list assumes data is being collected and a surprising number of properties are collecting nothing.

When this was first announced is covered in Google set a date to switch off Universal Analytics.

Frequently asked questions

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