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How to Convert UA to Google Analytics 4

Cody Schneider••8 min read

Universal Analytics officially stopped processing new data in July 2023, leaving Google Analytics 4 as the new standard. If you're still making sense of the new interface and data model, you're not alone. This guide walks you through the practical steps of migrating your setup from UA to GA4 and helps you translate your old reporting workflows to the new platform.

"Converting" is the Wrong Word: Thinking the GA4 Way

First, let's clear up a common misunderstanding. You can't directly "convert" a Universal Analytics property into a Google Analytics 4 property. They are built on fundamentally different measurement models, and your UA historical data will not transfer over to GA4.

  • Universal Analytics was session-based. It grouped user interactions (like pageviews, events, and transactions) into sessions. Think of it like a container for everything a user does in a 30-minute window.
  • Google Analytics 4 is event-based. Everything is an event - a page view is an event, a scroll is an event, an add-to-cart is an event, and a purchase is an event. This model offers a more flexible and user-centric view of how people interact with your site or app across different platforms and sessions.

Your goal isn't to convert old data. It’s to configure GA4 to collect the business-critical information you need from this point forward, recreating the measurement capabilities you relied on in UA.

Phase 1: Getting Your GA4 Property Set Up Correctly

Whether you've already started or are just getting going, it's a good idea to ensure your foundational setup is solid. A faulty setup will lead to inaccurate data.

Use the GA4 Setup Assistant

If you haven't created a GA4 property yet, Google's Setup Assistant is the easiest starting point. Inside your Universal Analytics account:

  1. Navigate to the Admin section by clicking the gear icon in the bottom-left corner.
  2. In the 'Property' column, click on GA4 Setup Assistant.
  3. Click the blue "Get Started" button and then "Create Property."

This wizard automatically creates a new GA4 property and copies basic settings like your property name and website URL from Universal Analytics. It does not add the GA4 tracking tag to your site or migrate your previous data.

Install Your GA4 Tracking Tag

For GA4 to start collecting data, its tracking tag (or "snippet") needs to be installed on your website. After creating your property, you'll be prompted to set up a Data Stream. This is where you'll find your tracking information. Head to Admin > Data Streams > [Your Web Stream] to find your Measurement ID (it looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX).

Here are the most common installation methods:

  • For Google Tag Manager (GTM) Users (Recommended): This is the most flexible approach. Create a new "Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration" tag in your GTM container, paste your Measurement ID, and set the trigger to fire on all pages.
  • For CMS Platforms (WordPress, Shopify, etc.): Most platforms have a dedicated field for your GA measurement ID in their settings or analytics integration section. Find the appropriate field and paste in your G- ID.
  • Manual Installation (Hardcoding): You can copy the entire tracking snippet from your Data Stream settings and paste it into the <head> section of every page on your website, but this is less common and harder to manage.

Check Your Initial Data Settings

Before moving on, verify a couple of important settings in Admin > Data Settings:

  • Data Collection: Go through the 'Google signals' setup. Enabling this lets you gather more insightful data on users who have ads personalization turned on in their Google accounts, giving you better demographic information and audience capabilities for remarketing.
  • Data Retention: By default, GA4 only stores user-level data for 2 months. You'll likely want to change this. Navigate to 'Data Retention' and increase the "Event data retention" setting to the maximum of 14 months.

Phase 2: Recreating Your UA Goals and Audiences

This is the core of your migration. You need to teach GA4 what an important action, or 'conversion,' looks like on your website.

Understand the New Event Model

Instead of UA's rigid "Category, Action, Label" system, GA4 gives you a much simpler structure: just an event name and optional parameters (pieces of extra information). There are a few types of events:

  • Automatically collected events: These are tracked automatically just for having the GA4 tag installed. Think page_view, session_start, and first_visit.
  • Enhanced measurement events: These are also automatic if you have Enhanced Measurement enabled in your Data Stream. They include scroll (when a user scrolls 90% of a page), click (for outbound links), file_download, and video_progress.
  • Recommended events: Google provides lists of standardized event names for different industries (e.g., add_to_cart for e-commerce, generate_lead for B2B) to help maintain clean data.
  • Custom events: Anything else you want to track that isn't covered above. You can name these whatever you want (e.g., form_submission_contact, demo_request_clicked).

Rebuilding UA Goals as GA4 Conversions

In UA, you had "Goals." In GA4, these are simply called "Conversions." Anything you track as an event can be marked as a conversion.

Let's walk through an example of migrating a "Contact Form Submission" goal.

  1. Track the form submission as a custom event. The best way to do this is with Google Tag Manager. You can create a trigger that recognizes when the form is successfully submitted (e.g., by spotting the "Thank You" message) and then use that trigger to fire a GA4 Event tag named something like contact_form_submit.
  2. Check that GA4 is receiving the event. After setting it up, submit a test form yourself. In GA4, go to Reports > Realtime. Within a minute or two, you should see your contact_form_submit event appear in the "Events" card.
  3. Mark the event as a conversion. Wait up to 24 hours for the event to be permanently registered in GA4. Then, go to Admin > Conversions. Your custom event (contact_form_submit) won't be there yet. Click the "New conversion event" button and type in the exact event name. GA4 will now treat every future instance of that event as a conversion.

This process - track an interaction as an event, then toggle it on as a conversion - is the replacement for UA's Goal setup. Repeat this for all your old Destination, Duration, and Event goals.

Migrating Audiences

Recreating your audiences is fairly straightforward. In GA4, head to Admin > Audiences and click "New audience." You will find pre-built templates and options to create custom audiences using the same logic you used in UA. For example, to create an audience of users who visited your pricing page:

  • Create a custom audience.
  • Set the condition to be on the event page_view.
  • Add a parameter page_location (which contains your website URL) to filter for pages that contain /pricing.

Phase 3: Finding Your Data & Translating UA Reports

"Where did all my favorite reports go?" is the most common GA4 question. The interface is different, but most of your data is still there once you know where to look.

Key Report Sections

The "Reports" section in GA4 has four main areas:

  • Acquisition: Where did your users come from? (e.g., Organic Search, Paid, Social).
  • Engagement: What do users do on your site? (e.g., which pages they view, what events they trigger).
  • Monetization: E-commerce and revenue tracking.
  • Demographics/Tech: Who are your users and what devices do they use?

Where to Find Common UA Reports in GA4

One major metric change is Bounce Rate. GA4 replaces it with Engagement Rate, which is the percentage of sessions that were 'engaged.' An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least two pageviews. It’s a much more useful indicator of content quality.

Use 'Explore' for Deeper Analysis

The standard GA4 reports are less customizable than they were in UA. For anything that requires adding secondary dimensions, filters, or creating advanced segments, you'll need to use the Explore section. Explorations let you build custom reports by dragging and dropping dimensions and metrics - similar to the old custom reports in UA but far more powerful.

Don't Forget to Archive Your UA Data!

Your historical UA data is no longer accessible via the interface. If you didn't proactively export it before the shutdown, that data is now gone. If you did an export, you can always connect that data file (from Google Sheets or a database) to visualization tools to compare past performance with your new GA4 data.

Final Thoughts

Moving from Universal Analytics to GA4 is less about executing a technical conversion and more about adopting a new framework for user measurement. By properly setting up your events, rebuilding your conversions, and learning the new reporting interface, you can move past the jarring transition and start taking advantage of GA4's more powerful, flexible analytics capabilities.

The GA4 interface can feel complicated, and pulling reports across multiple platforms to see the full picture often turns into a manual chore. To make this process easier, we built Graphed to connect directly to data sources like Google Analytics 4. Instead of hunting through menus, we let you just ask questions in plain English - like "Which acquisition channels are driving the most conversions this month?" or "Create a dashboard showing my top landing pages from organic search." We instantly build the dashboard for you with live data, so you can get insights in seconds, not hours.

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