Universal Analytics is shutting down - here's what you need to be doing right now
This is not a drill. Last Friday, Google emailed us all with a reminder that Universal Analytics ('UA') will be sunsetting on 1 July 2023. Some of us wondered whether this deadline might be extended, but if you're not one to take chances with your online business, it's time to get busy preparing for this major change. Here's what you should be doing.
Start actually paying attention to your GA data
If it's something you only look at once a month, or you simply look at your Shopify analytics dashboard, you're missing out on a wealth of opportunities to scale and grow. All the fast-growing eCommerce businesses out there make daily decisions based on their independent Google Analytics' data as a primary source of intel - for many good reasons:
GA can tell us where our traffic growth is coming from and what opportunities there are to scale, which channels are driving first interactions with our store and which are last touch channels that close a sale
GA shows us how customers are behaving on site - our primary landing pages, how customers are shopping, adding to cart and allows us to troubleshoot checkout issues
We can assess how Facebook/Meta ad traffic is truly performing on-site in the wake of iOS 14 limitations, now Facebook's own Ads platform is using modelled data we are unlikely to trust
Stop waiting around for Shopify to release a native integration
People, Shopify is giving us zilch right now. Unfortunately at the time of writing, Shopify has no native copy/paste the ID-style integration and is still staying quiet on when that will be. But you should not wait for that.
GA4 is an entirely new platform and there's no option to migrate UA data across, so you'll be starting from scratch. You should be running GA4 in parallel with Universal Analytics in preparation - this means your store will be sending data to these two separate accounts at the same time. Why? Because the sooner your GA4 account starts gathering data, the less time you'll spend manually comparing your year-on-year data.
If you're a retailer, it's likely that you need to accommodate seasonal fluctuations when looking at performance, which means month-on-month comparisons won't tell you much. You need to be comparing what happened this month to the previous year - and until you have a year's worth of GA4 data under your belt, this will be a painful and manual exercise you should be avoiding. Prioritise setting up GA4 now, even without a native integration.
Setup GA4 with a full eCommerce integration, don't copy/paste codes
Sure, you can copy/paste the codes GA4 gives you into your Shopify liquid theme - but that will only give you some basic data and will not enable the full eCommerce events which give us the real value from GA4's new features - list view, item view, add to cart and all the custom parameters that give us that real depth of information into user behaviour.
I strongly recommend setting up GA4 with a full eCommerce integration using Google Tag Manager. Many of us aren't a fan of GTM (me neither), but it's currently the only way to get this sort of integration up and running until Shopify releases a native option.
If you're on Shopify Plus and have a developer on hand, Github has several resources they can try out. If you're on standard Shopify, we don't have access to the checkout.liquid you'll need to pay for the setup using a GTM expert or an integration app - some vary between a done for you service and others offer self-service options.
Beware the Google searches that offer copy/paste solutions. There is currently no current full eCommerce integration for Shopify that does not involve GTM.
Backup your historical UA data
To make matters even more urgent, Google has indicated that when UA stops processing data on 1 July 2023, we'll be left with a maximum of 6 months' of data, after which your UA data will be entirely deleted at some stage.
This means if you want to retain your historical data for ongoing comparisons (and you should), you'll need to back it up yourself before it's deleted. As I mentioned, there's no way we can import UA historical data into GA4.
There are several options here - you can manually export the data through CSV files or Google Sheets integrations, or you can backup the raw data using a tool like BigQuery. All of these options you can then connect and manipulate in Data Studio, Power BI or a similar tool. But you need to
Start learning and using GA4 starting now
Getting setup on GA4 is only half the battle - you don't want to wait until UA shuts down to get comfortable using GA4 and transitioning any of your reporting or Data Studio templates, or you'll end up in a mad scramble right in the middle of a busy financial year's end.
GA4 offers a wealth of new features which stores are using right now to grow their revenue - improved user ID across channels and sessions, new and improved metrics like 'engagement rate' and a new focus on customer lifetime value being only a few. These features have no value to you or your team unless you start using them on a daily basis to drive your decision making.
Here's where the shameless plug comes in - if you want to make all this easy for you and your team, and get going on learning GA4 from an eCommerce and growth expert, I cover all this and more in my online course GA4 for eCommerce, which is available now.
You'll learn how to setup and customise your GA4 with full eCommerce integration so you're using accurate, full data from the get-go, I also cover all these new GA4 features and how you can use them to provoke actionable insights to grow your revenue for the short and the long term, with regular updates and step by step tutorials on how to back up your UA data so you can use it ongoing. Get your entire team involved and your business will reap the rewards of data literacy!