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When Did Google Analytics 4 Go Live?

Cody Schneider•

Google Analytics 4, or GA4, officially became the default analytics platform on July 1, 2023. This date marked the "sunset" of its predecessor, Universal Analytics (UA), which stopped processing new website data. This article will walk you through the full timeline of the GA4 transition, explain the critical reasons behind this monumental shift, and highlight the key differences you need to know.

The GA4 Timeline: A Gradual Rollout, Not an Overnight Switch

While July 1, 2023, was the decisive deadline, the story of GA4 began much earlier. It wasn’t a sudden change but a multi-year transition designed to give businesses time to adapt to a completely new way of measuring digital engagement.

October 2020: The Official Launch

Google Analytics 4 was officially launched in October 2020. Before its official GA4 branding, it existed as the "App + Web" property, signaling Google’s intent to create a unified measurement system for both websites and mobile applications. From this point forward, any new property created in Google Analytics was a GA4 property by default, though users could still create a UA property if they dug through the "Advanced options."

March 2022: The Sunset Announcement

This was the moment the transition became real for millions of businesses. Google officially announced that all standard Universal Analytics properties would stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. Properties for paying customers, known as Analytics 360, were given a slightly later deadline of October 1, 2023. This announcement lit a fire under marketers and analysts, starting a 15-month countdown to migrate or risk losing all future data tracking.

July 1, 2023: The Universal Analytics "Sunset"

This was the final processing day for standard UA properties. On this date, any websites still running only the Universal Analytics tracking code stopped collecting new data. Your historical data wasn't deleted at this point, but your reports became frozen in time, reflecting traffic only up to June 30, 2023.

July 1, 2024: The Final Farewell

One year after the processing sunset, Google will completely decommission Universal Analytics. On this date, all users - including 360 customers - will lose access to the Universal Analytics interface and the API. All historical data stored in Universal Analytics will be permanently deleted. This makes it crucial for businesses to export any legacy reports they wish to keep before this final deadline.

Why Did Google Force the Switch to GA4?

The transition from UA to GA4 was much more than a simple product update, it was a fundamental reimagining of web analytics. This change was driven by three massive shifts in the digital landscape:

1. User Behavior is Now Cross-Platform

Universal Analytics was built for the desktop-first internet of the 2000s. Its data model was built around "sessions" and "pageviews," perfect for tracking a user's single visit to a website on a single device. But that's not how people behave anymore.

Today's user journey is fragmented. A user might discover your brand through an ad on their phone, browse your site on a tablet, and make a final purchase on their desktop computer. UA struggled to stitch these interactions together into a single, cohesive user story. GA4 was built from the ground up with an event-based model. This means every interaction - a page view, a button click, a form submission, a transaction - is captured as a distinct "event." This new model allows Google to de-duplicate users and better map their entire journey across your website and apps.

2. The Future of Analytics is Cookieless

For years, digital analytics and advertising relied on third-party cookies to track users across the web. However, mounting privacy concerns from users and new regulations like GDPR and CCPA have led to the rapid decline of cookies. Major browsers like Safari and Firefox already block them, and Google Chrome is phasing them out.

GA4 is Google’s answer to this privacy-first future. It leans more heavily on first-party data and uses advanced machine learning and statistical modeling to fill in the gaps left by missing cookie data. With features like Google Signals and Consent Mode, it's designed to provide insights into user behavior while respecting user privacy and consent choices. This allows GA4 to model conversions and user behavior even when complete data can't be collected, a capability UA simply wasn't built for.

3. Predictive Analytics Have Become Essential

UA was great for reporting on what already happened. GA4 is built to help you predict what will happen next. By integrating Google's machine learning technology directly into the platform, GA4 offers predictive metrics available to all users, not just enterprise-level customers. These include:

  • Purchase Probability: The likelihood that an active user will make a purchase in the next 7 days.

  • Churn Probability: The likelihood that a recently active user will not visit your site or app in the next 7 days.

  • Predicted Revenue: The expected revenue from all purchase conversions within the next 28 days from a group of active users.

These forward-looking metrics empower businesses to be more proactive, allowing them to identify high-value audiences for ad campaigns or target at-risk users with re-engagement offers before they churn.

Key Differences: Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4

The shift from UA to GA4 brings changes to nearly every aspect of the analytics process, from data collection and terminology to the reporting interface itself.

Core Data Model: Sessions vs. Events

This is the most critical difference. In UA, everything revolved around the concept of a session. User actions were categorized into different "hit types" like pageviews, events, and transactions.

  • UA Model: A user starts a session, triggers a pageview hit, then triggers an event hit (like clicking a video), and finally a transaction hit.

In GA4, there’s only one star of the show: the event. A session is no longer the central framework for reporting. Instead, everything a user does is captured as an event. Even a pageview is now just an event named page_view.

  • GA4 Model: A user triggers a page_view event, then a video_start event, then a purchase event. Each event can have additional parameters for more context (e.g., the page_view event has a page_title parameter).

This event-based structure is far more flexible and delivers a more accurate, user-centric view of how people interact with your business online.

Metrics and Terminology

Many familiar UA metrics are gone or have been replaced in GA4. Here are a few key changes:

  • Bounce Rate is Replaced by Engagement Rate: Bounce Rate was often a misleading metric. Someone could land on your blog, spend ten minutes reading an entire article, and still be counted as a "bounce" if they didn't click to another page. GA4 introduces Engaged Sessions, which are sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, have a conversion event, or have at least 2 pageviews. Engagement rate is simply the percentage of sessions that were engaged, providing a much smarter measure of whether users are actually interacting with a page.

  • Goals are now Conversions: In UA, you configured "Goals" to track conversions. In GA4, any event can be marked as a "Conversion" with a simple toggle switch in the admin settings. This is much easier and far more flexible.

  • No More Monthly Hit Limits: The free version of UA had a limit of 10 million hits per property per month. GA4 removes this processing limit, allowing you to collect an unlimited volume of data, although there is a limit on the number of distinct event names you can have.

The Reporting Interface

One of the first things users notice about GA4 is that the reporting interface is much simpler – some would even say sparse. UA had an overwhelming number of pre-built standard reports. GA4 provides fewer standard reports, instead pushing users toward the "Explore" section (also known as the Explorations Hub).

This is where GA4 truly shines. Explorations give you drag-and-drop tools to build completely custom reports and Funnel visualizations, Path explorations, and Segment overlaps. It’s less about passively viewing pre-canned reports and more about actively asking questions about your data to uncover insights.

Free BigQuery Integration

In the UA era, a direct connection to stream raw data into BigQuery (Google's data warehouse) was a feature reserved for paying Analytics 360 customers. With GA4, this feature is now available to everybody for free. This is a game-changer, as it allows even small businesses to own their raw, unsampled event data permanently. You can then query this data with SQL to perform incredibly deep, custom analyses that go far beyond what's possible in the GA4 interface itself.

Final Thoughts

The launch of Google Analytics 4 wasn't just a product refresh, it was a necessary evolution in response to a transformed digital world. While the ultimate deadline for Universal Analytics to stop processing data was July 1, 2023, the transition represents a broader shift towards a more privacy-conscious, user-centric, and predictive model of analytics.

Navigating this new, more powerful platform definitely involves a learning curve. Understanding the event-based model and learning to build custom reports in the Explorations Hub can be a challenge. That’s why we built our platform to help people bridge that gap. With Graphed, you can securely connect your Google Analytics 4 account and get straight to the answers without the struggle. Simply ask questions in plain English - like "Which landing pages are driving the most conversions this month?" or "Show me a comparison of revenue from Google Ads versus organic search" - and our AI data analyst builds real-time dashboards for you in seconds.