Welcome back this is John Locke for Lockedown SEO and today I want to talk about Google Analytics,
the Universal Analytics, the legacy Analytics being retired on July 1st 2023. Google announced
very recently on the Google webmaster central blog that on July 1st 2023, the old Universal Analytics
you are used to using will be sunsetted, meaning that everyone will have to switch
over to Google Analytics 4. Now what this means for most of people that have not already set up a
Google Analytics 4 account, it means you should do so so you have the data from now until in
perpetuity . But at least you'll have a year and three months worth of data. So if you already have
set up a Google Universal Analytics tag in the past you can switch over to Google Analytics
4 provided that you're using Google Tag Manager in the tracking code. And we'll show you that in just
a minute. However if you're using an older tag for the tracking code, and it'll say
Google Analytics Object [in the code], this older code you will not be able to switch to the Google
Analytics 4. What you'll have to do in that case instead is go into your Google Analytics account,
and look at the specific property and get the tracking code for that property,
and then install it on your site. The current tags are using the Google Google Tag Manager to do
that now again Google has made it very simple to switch. I'll show you that in just one second. But
the important part is you want to be collecting as much data as possible the old Universal Analytics
data will go away very shortly and that's we're ticking down. It's probably like about 15 months.
The time to start collecting data is right now. Okay so if you have an existing Google Analytics
tag that uses Google Tag Manager, there's a way to change this. So what the Google Tag Manager
tag looks like, it'll look like this, it'll say Google Tag Manager right there. All right,
what you would want to do is, go to GA4 setup assistant, and say I would like to create a new
Google Analytics 4 property now. If you already have one (GA4 property) and you click down here,
select an existing Google Analytics 4 property, if you do not have one it'll be grayed out, and
this tool tip will say you have no GA4 properties to connect. If you hit this "get started",
it should automagically check this box and it will basically copy your basic settings from
your Universal Analytics property, your legacy Google Analytics, so just say "create property",
and then you can see that there's a new property ID. Go see your GA4 property,
and it's all right there. So then you can just go back to Reports. Okay so this is basically
what it would look like after a little bit. this is what it will look like when your
Google Analytics 4 starts kicking in. There you go, so now that you've seen how to
make the switch over to Google Analytics 4 using your existing Universal Analytics tag, and both
of those are going to run side by side in parallel to each other until the older one is deprecated.
But you have that information at hand and you have that data being collected. If you are a business
owner of a website, or if you're an agency, if you're a webmaster of any kind, this is something
that you should be doing right now. If you enjoyed this video give it a thumb up and subscribe.
I am publishing on a regular basis. This is John for Lockedown SEO, and until next time peace.