GAU, GA4 & GTM! WTF…

It’s March 2022, the Earth is still spinning, and digital marketers across the globe logged into their Google Analytics™ accounts and began repeating to themselves, “I knew it was coming, but so soon, am I ready?”

All this in response to a banner that had appeared at the top of Google Analytics™ accounts that read:

“Universal Analytics will no longer process new data in standard properties beginning 1 July 2023. Prepare now by setting up and switching over to a Google Analytics 4 property.”

As the mantra above reads, “I knew it was coming” and we did. Google soft-launched GA4 (Google Analytics™ 4) in October 2020 and as of October 14^th 2020, GA4 was the default when setting up new properties.

So we knew the switch was on the horizon and pro-active marketers immediately signed up for their shiny new GA4 property, running it in parallel with their existing GAU (Google Analytics™ Universal) properties and all was well. They dipped in when new features were announced, played around with setup and settings, and got familiar.

Then Google™ put a retirement date on GAU and it all became real. And despite being given more than a year’s notice, the mad scramble of the unprepared began. Because suddenly the less proactive had the realisation that they really should have GA4 set up by July 1^st 2022, so that when the candles are blown out on the GAU retirement cake, they and their clients have an entire year of GA4 data to use.

So where are we today?

Well for a while there was very little information and guidance about the best way to set up GAU and GA4 to run in parallel? Even direct phone conversations with Google reps eventually lead to an audible shrug.

But slowly several influencers in the space started putting out helpful how-to guides, with their best guess at “best practice.”

Now Google has updated their Analytics Help Centre with a myriad of guides on how to migrate from GAU to GA4 and to be perfectly honest, it is a cacophony of developer-level jargon that overwhelms rather than informs.

To simplify things I would like to provide this initial information to easily get you up and running with the most basic GA4 data collection.

Choose what applies to you from the options below.

No Existing Analytics

Easy, navigate to https://analytics.google.com/ and set up a new account, follow the instructions or pass them to your developer and you will automatically be using GA4.

You can set up a GAU property under advanced settings, but if you’re not using Analytics at the moment, best not to muddy the waters and simply start with the new one.

Active Universal Analytics

Using GTM (Google Tag Manager)

1. Navigate to https://analytics.google.com/
2. Click Admin in the bottom-left corner
3. Click GA4 Setup Assistant in the column
4. Under “I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property” click Get Started
5. Leave Optional Setup checked and click Create Property
6. Click “Go to your Google Analytics 4 property”
7. Click Tag Installation
8. Click the relevant Data Stream
9. Copy the Measurement ID to your clipboard
10. Navigate to GTM and select your existing website container
11. Click New Tag and label it as you wish
12. Click Tag Configuration and Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration
13. Paste the Measurement ID
14. Click on the Triggering box (Below Tag Configuration) and select All Pages
15. Click Save
16. In the Top-Right click Submit, then Publish

Without Using GTM

Follow Steps 1-8 from above

9. Scroll down to “Tagging Instructions” and here you have a choice:
   1. (Recommended) Add new on-page tag – This code will need to replace the existing universal tag on the website. You will then need to scroll down and add the UA Tracking ID (UA-xxxxxxxxx-x) under “Manage connected site tags”

      This approach will make GA4 the primary account and GA4 will fire the GAU tracking for you.

   2. (Not Recommended) Use existing on-page tag – and follow the instructions provided

      This will make GAU the primary account and GAU will fire the GA4 tracking for you. Considering Google plans to move on from GAU, it will be best to move on from GAU tags

Once you have completed the relevant steps from above, open the website on a browser. (I usually use my mobile) and navigate to real-time reports. You should see at least one active session, on a mobile phone in your general geo location.

As mentioned, this is the basic GA4 setup. From here you will want to define some events and conversions and get those tracking too, but we’ll pick that up in a later post.

Obviously in the event that you need help with the above, please get in touch with Marketing Managed (Bacon Marketing) and talk to us about our various support services.

We do this for B2B companies every day through our B2B marketing services.