On Saturday, standard Universal Analytics properties stop processing new data. Google announced the change more than a year ago. Nevertheless, a significant number of small businesses are likely to discover it next week, when they open their reports and find that the data has stopped.
Universal Analytics has been in use since approximately 2012. For many websites, this represents a decade of history in a familiar interface, which will simply cease to update. Google Analytics 4 is the replacement, and it differs substantially from what users are accustomed to. Google has even been creating GA4 properties automatically for sites that never set one up, which indicates how many have not yet made the transition.
What does the end of Universal Analytics mean in practice?
The details are available on Google's Universal Analytics sunset help page. In summary, standard properties stop collecting data on July 1, the paid 360 version receives an additional year, and existing reports remain accessible for a period afterward. Google has indicated at least six months, after which they will be deleted.
Businesses wishing to retain any data from the past ten years should therefore export it themselves, promptly. In practice, most small businesses need very little of it. Traffic figures from 2016 will not influence a decision made next spring. A few year-over-year totals and the best-performing months are generally sufficient.
The more significant issue is that GA4 measures activity differently. Universal Analytics was built around sessions and pageviews; GA4 is built around events. Every interaction is an event, and many familiar reports are no longer available. Users log in, encounter an unfamiliar interface and close it, and some may not return.
What does a basic GA4 setup for a small business include?
Mastering GA4 is not necessary. Completing four or five configuration steps correctly is sufficient, after which the tool requires little attention.
Set up conversions for bookings and calls
By default, GA4 reports how many people visited the site. It does not indicate whether any of them took action.
For a small business, the meaningful actions usually form a short list: a contact form submission, a tap on the phone number from a mobile device, a completed booking or purchase, or a click for directions.
Each of these actions should be tracked as an event and then marked as a conversion, which requires a single toggle in the events list once the event exists.
The setup method depends on the site. A thank-you page following a form submission is the simplest option. Phone taps usually require Google Tag Manager or a plugin. The process requires some care the first time, after which it is complete.
Keep the list short; three or four conversions are sufficient. If every action is marked as important, none stands out, and the data again becomes difficult to interpret.
Link Search Console to GA4
GA4 records what people did on the site; Google Search Console records what they searched for to find it. Once the two are linked, it becomes possible to see which searches led people to which pages. The link is configured in the GA4 admin under product links and takes about five minutes.
If Search Console has not yet been set up, that should be the first step. It is free, and it is the most useful tool Google provides to small business owners, more useful, in our assessment, than Analytics.
We recommend reviewing the search queries once a month. They often reveal terms customers use that appear nowhere on the site, which frequently indicates the next page to create.
Adjust the data retention setting
This setting is overlooked by most users. By default, GA4 retains detailed event data for two months. This can be extended to 14 months in the admin settings. We recommend making this change on the first day, since data already discarded cannot be recovered.
Why build one simple weekly report?
Because complex dashboards are rarely consulted. This is where most setups fail: users build an elaborate dashboard with twenty charts, view it twice and then forget about it.
Select a small set of figures and review them every Monday morning, for example:
- visitors this week compared with the same week last year
- the number of conversions (forms, calls, bookings)
- where those visitors came from (Google search, Facebook, direct, a newsletter)
- the top five pages
This is sufficient to detect when something stops working, when a season begins or when a post has genuinely attracted visitors. The report can be built as a custom report in GA4 or in Looker Studio, or the figures can simply be recorded in a spreadsheet. The regular habit matters more than the tool.
One limitation applies to comparisons with "the same week last year": a GA4 property may not yet have a full year of data. We recommend keeping the Universal Analytics export available for these comparisons and allowing GA4 a full season before relying on its trends. Seasonal businesses should always compare with the same period of the previous year, never with the previous week. Tourism activity in July and in November follows entirely different patterns.
How should a business approach GA4's limitations?
By focusing on the measurements that matter. GA4 is not an easy tool to use: it is cumbersome, some previously relied-upon reports are no longer available, and we hope Google will restore some of them. Some businesses may reasonably conclude that a simpler, privacy-focused analytics tool better suits their needs. A simple tool that is consulted regularly provides more value than GA4 left unused.
On the subject of privacy, Quebec's Law 25 includes rules on tracking technologies on websites that take effect this September. This is an appropriate time to review the site's cookie notice.
The positive aspect of this transition is the shift in focus it encourages: from counting visitors as the objective to measuring what visitors actually do. A site with 300 visits and 15 calls is performing better than one with 3,000 visits and no resulting action.
If tracking was never configured properly, or if it is unclear whether calls and form submissions are being recorded, we recommend having your conversion tracking and analytics reviewed. This is usually a short engagement.
The loss of historical data should not be a major concern. The data collected correctly from Saturday onward will be of greater value.