Hello, I'm Matt Landers and in this video I'm going to tell you what it
takes to migrate your Google Analytics property from the old version to the
new version so that you don't miss out on future website analytics.
If you haven't yet migrated yet or if you don't even know what that means, that's okay,
this is probably the right video for you. I'll explain what's happening, how it affects you,
and what you need to do to continue measuring user activity on your website. [Music]
First, just to lay the groundwork, Google Analytics is a measurement platform
that helps you understand what users are doing on your website.
And every Google Analytics account can have one or more properties, and a property represents
your website, and it's within a property where you organize your data and set up your reports.
A few years ago, we introduced a new type of property called Google Analytics 4 or GA4.
And since then, you've been able to measure user activity in the old type and the new type
of property. But on July of 2023, we're going to stop processing information that's sent to
your old type of property, which means that it's really important for you to get migrated to the
new version of Google Analytics -- GA4 -- in order to continue measuring user activity on
your website after July. So one quick caveat is that if you are a GA360 customer, you'll have one
extra year to make this migration, but I highly recommend that you go ahead and get migrated now,
so that you have that historical data whenever you do finally migrate. So what's going to happen if
you don't do this migration: If you don't do the migration yourself, we're going to automatically
create a new GA4 property for you and migrate as many of the settings and configuration over
as we can. But it's important to note that we can't automatically migrate everything,
so it's a much better experience if you go ahead and migrate your property on your own.
That way, you get everything that you need in your new property before the cutoff date in July.
If you don't want us to create a property for you, you can opt out of the automatically created
property within the "GA4 Setup Assistant" of your old property type. Okay, now that we have all that
out of the way, let's jump over into a demo and see how to get migrated to your new GA4 property.
Okay, I'm at the home page of a Universal Analytics account that we need to migrate to GA4.
Now when you log into your account, you'll probably see something similar, but you can
also come up here and you'll see all the accounts that you're associated with and the properties.
You're looking for any property that starts with "UA" like here: "UA-" -- that means that that is
a Universal Analytics property and it needs to be converted. So that's what we're in here. Now,
you may or may not see this banner at the top. If you do, you can just click "Manage GA4 migration"
right here. If you don't have that there, you can go down to your Admin down here in the bottom
left, and then go to GA4 Setup Assistant. When you get over here, you're going to be presented
with a couple of options. If you already have a GA4 property associated to this Universal
Analytics property, then you'll see that here and you'll be able to click straight into the Setup
Assistant in your GA4 property. If you created a GA4 property before, you can also link that
existing property with this drop down here. But if you haven't created one, like this property,
all you have to do is click "Get started" and that will create your GA4 property.
So I'll go ahead and click that. Then I'll be presented with the dialogue just to confirm my
selection, and after a few seconds a new dialogue is going to pop up about my Google tag. Now,
your Google tag is just a little snippet of code that goes on your website. It measures
user activity and then sends that to Google Analytics for processing. Now, ideally you have
the option to use an existing tag here. If you do, definitely go ahead and select that option.
If not, you'll have to get that tag installed on your site by your developer or if you have a CMS
where you can do it yourself, you can install a plugin and make that happen. But this is -- this
just needs to happen to start sending data to your new property. Alright, so I'm going to say
install new tag and just to get through this, but use an existing tag if you already have it.
Okay, once I'm done, I'm going to be brought back to the assistant and I'll be in my UA account,
still. So my Universal Analytics account. Whenever I click this button,
it'll take me over to my brand new GA4 property. So let's do it. That'll open in a new tab, so now
we have both of our properties open. But now I'm in the Setup Assistant, and this Setup Assistant
is meant to be a checklist of all the things that you need to do before you're completely migrated.
So you need to go through this list one by one and make sure that you migrate each item.
Now, some things you may not want to migrate and that's okay. Either way, once that item
is completely migrated, you're going to want to go to the arrow and mark it as complete, and when you
do that, you'll see that the progress bar inches towards being completely migrated. And once you
go through all of the items, you will be completed with your migration and ready to go. Now there's
a lot that you need to consider in here whenever you're migrating. If you look at the description
of this video, we'll have links to other resources to how to migrate each of these individually,
and if you're on an article watching this video then that information should be in that article
for you. Okay, hopefully this gets you started on your way to migrating to Google Analytics 4,
and if you have any questions or comments please leave them on the video and we'll
try to answer them. Alright, go out there and get migrated, and happy measuring!
[Music]