From the 1st of July 2024, Universal Analytics Data & Properties will begin to be deleted by Google. Unless this data has been exported & backed up, you run the risk that all of that historical (and precious) web data will be lost.
So, what does all this mean and what can you do about it?
What do Google recommend?
Google’s recommendation is to trawl through your historic Analytics and manually export individual reports containing all of this data. For advanced users that are well versed in Analytics 360, Google recommend that you use the Google Analytics Reporting API to export data to Cloud storage.
However, there are several challenges that come with this recommendation. Firstly, there is the time element. As marketers will know, this manual process can be extremely time-consuming & labour intensive for users. This is a lengthy process at the best of times and becomes even more challenging for users who are operating and managing multiple domains.
The process of exporting this data to the cloud is also highly complex. This is a technical process and given the short timelines until this data is deleted involves an unnecessary degree of risk when exporting this valuable data.
Finally, there an array of difficulties from a usability standpoint. One of the main issues with the manual method is that these exports don’t allow users to query their data using date ranges. This significantly limits the valuable insights that users can extract when comparing data. Secondly, exporting and navigating this data using Google Sheets makes formatting & consequently analysis unnecessarily difficult.
What can I do instead?
If neither of the above options look suitable you’re in luck! We have developed a bespoke solution using Google API/Big Query that streamlines the export of your Universal Analytics data and ensures that the data is user-friendly and accessible within LookerStudio. The data is presented in a format that gives marketers visibility of all of the familiar channels from Universal Analytics including acquisition channels, sources/mediums, landing pages, conversions, page views etc….
In addition to this, our solution also provides ecommerce transaction level data and supports both the free and 360 versions of Universal Analytics.
The clock is ticking so if you’d like to discuss how we could help you with this process get in touch with our team today to find out more.