With what it had cost you to get used to the interface of Google Analytics and how long it took you to learn the new features. Well, off you go! New program, new criteria and new interface. Off to create new slides for my classes! (I have been teaching the subject of Digital Analytics in the Bachelor's degree for three years now) La Salle Technology Business Administration – Ramon Llull University)
This week Google has set a date and time for the burial of Universal Analytics, the traditional Google Analytics: as of July 1, 2023, this tool will stop working.
The truth is that Google had already warned us more than a year ago. And we also know that cookies disappear in 2023. So it is normal for Google to retire this tool that has been with us for so many years… (I confess that when I was at the forefront of managing digital companies, I never went to bed without looking at how the website had performed during the day and planning some changes for the next day).
Whether I teach SEO or web analytics, I always say that “Google Analytics is going to be your best friend”… Damn, now we have to change friends!
What should I do with my old Google Analytics?
Since December 2020, I have been recommending that you have both Google Analytics installed and that you run them in parallel. Why? Because it won't let you export data from Universal Analytics (GA3) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4, from now on). It won't let you export it because it has changed the criteria for what is a visit, what is a bounce (in fact, the bounce rate has been changed and replaced by the interactivity rate) and in general, the way of measuring has changed. It also has good things like when someone scrolls on the website, it counts as interactivity.
In short, when GA3 stops working, if you didn't have GA4 beforehand, you won't have a history of your site's performance. The sooner you install GA4, the better. You'll find instructions in the GA3 configuration menu.
The basic configuration is intuitive, but the eCommerce configuration is not so much. Here I leave a video which will help you configure this last part in GA4.
Why has Google made this change?
Well… there are several reasons why Google has changed the way it tracks. The first is the fact that many companies have both a website and a mobile app. With GA4 you can have different data input streams and therefore it allows you to measure website and app performance in the same tool. That’s a big deal!
The second is the one I mentioned before: Chrome will stop using Cookie technology at some point in 2023 and GA3 was based on this technology. This is how it distinguished users from visits, knew if they were new or recurring, calculated the bounce rate, the time spent on a page, etc. All this is over. We will have to use another type of technology to continue obtaining this type of data… although on the Internet now the “ga3” will reign.privacy-first» before marketing interests. I'm not complaining, that's fine with me.
Those of us who are of a certain age still remember what life was like before Cookies and before Google Analytics…we also remember the pain of managing logs to run the analytics programs of the day. But hey, we were passing user sessions through the URL and learning everything we could about user behavior on our website with the data we had. I think this is one of the reasons why Google has lowered the weight of the URL in the algorithm… it is preparing for really long URLs. Search Engine Journal recently discussed the weight of URLs in the algorithm. They are still a ranking factor, but not as much as they were before. You can read the article here: URL as a ranking factor
Continuing with URLs, here I explain how Google now also looks at them to know What market are we targeting?.
Well, we will survive this change and new ways of tracking users will emerge so we can learn more about online behavior and optimize our websites. I am not particularly worried.
How else will it affect us?
The disappearance of cookies will affect advertising in particular. If you have carried out any campaigns recently, you will see that Google is already advising you to have other data sources to monitor your campaigns and control their ROI. It seems that the trend will be to leave the uploading of lists of clients and leads in our hands (like the look-a-like service that Facebook already offers). Artificial intelligence will also have more weight in the analysis of possible market segments that may become our clients. Google has already tracked users and their behavior, there is more than enough data to do all kinds of analysis. I am sure that it can already predict our intentions when browsing the Internet without having to use cookies.
In any case, it will be interesting to see how technology changes throughout this year to adapt to the new environment of 2023.
We will continue talking and I will share what I learn.
I hope this article has been useful to you.
A big hug.
