Google’s Universal Analytics stopped working on July 1. If your current Google Analytics account uses the Universal Analytics interface, it is no longer collecting data. You should have migrated it to GA4 by the GA4 deadline, which was June 30.
What if you didn’t? What should you do now?
Did you get automatic migration?
Google migrated some accounts automatically. Not all of them, though. We don’t know the criteria they used, but you should check your analytics dashboard first thing. If you have an account that is called something like “YourWebsite.com – GA4,” then your site should still be providing data to Google analytics and your information is being tracked.
If you click through to see your new GA4 site, you will see a message like this: “This property has been set up for you based on your original Universal Analytics property, reusing existing site tags and settings where possible. To see which settings have been automatically migrated, go to Admin > Change history. To verify that the migrated settings are accurate, review them in the Setup Assistant.”
The Setup Assistant will look like the screenshot above. You can go ahead and work through the elements and get your GA4 property set up correctly.
Your new analytics reports will show data from whenever your account was migrated — we’ve seen different dates.
If you have no GA4 account, set one up
If you don’t already have a GA4 account, you will need to set one up. Go to the Admin area and choose “Create Property.” You don’t need to specify GA4; you will be given a GA4 property by default. Work through the set up, connecting the new account to your old Universal Analytics account if you are given the option.
Here’s the important thing: until you set up the new GA4 account and connect your website and/or app with the account, you will not be tracking your site. You will see zero results for the days, beginning July 1, that you did not have the GA4 account set up. You can never get that information back.Se
Set up that analytics account whether or not you know how to use it. It will collect the data for you and be ready when you need it.
Download the old data
The information from Google’s Universal Analytics is still available for you to look at, even though it is not collecting or analyzing any new data going forward. If you still want to be able to compare information from Universal Analytics with information from after the GA4 deadline, you will need to save that information in some way. If you have Analytics 360, you can use BigQuery.
So far, the only affordable means of downloading the data from standard Universal Analytics accounts that we’ve found is manual downloads of all the reports you consider important.
Unless you have very little data, you may not need or want to download every report. However, Google has announced that the data will continue to be available for one year, so this could be a long-term project if you want to make sure you keep all your information. Just start with the highest-priority reports for your needs.
Just open the report you want to save. Click “Export” in the toolbar. Choose the format:
- CSV
- TSV
- TSV for Excel
- Excel (XLSX)
- Google Sheets
The report will be generated and automatically downloaded to your computer.
Remember, what you see is what you get. Make sure that you have chosen the right time period and so forth to get the information you want to save.
What if you need help?
We are happy to help if you need support with setting up your GA4 account or figuring out what to do with your Google Analytics.
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