When Did Google Analytics 4 Replace UA?

Universal Analytics (UA) officially stopped processing new website hits on July 1, 2023. This article covers the crucial upcoming deadlines for your historical data, explains exactly why Google made the switch, and walks you through what you need to do to adapt.

A Brief History of the Switch: The Key Dates

The transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 wasn’t just a simple update, it was a fundamental shift. If the dates feel a little fuzzy, you’re not alone. Here’s a clear timeline of what happened and, more importantly, what’s coming next.

• October 16, 2020: GA4 is officially released, moving out of beta and becoming the default new property type when setting up Google Analytics.
• July 1, 2023: The official "sundown" date. On this day, standard, free Universal Analytics properties stopped collecting and processing any new data. Clicks, sessions, and pageviews from this date forward are not captured in your UA property.
• July 1, 2024: This is the critical deadline you need to know about. On this day, Google will completely turn off the Universal Analytics interface and APIs. This means all of your historical UA data - every session, user, and conversion tracked before July 2023 - will be permanently deleted.

For paying customers of the enterprise version, Analytics 360, there was a temporary extension allowing them to process new data until July 1, 2024. However, the data deletion deadline is the same for everyone.

Why Did Google Force This Change Anyway? Moving Beyond Sessions and Pageviews

Let's be honest: for many marketers and business owners, the switch to GA4 felt sudden and disruptive. Universal Analytics was comfortable and familiar. So why did Google upend everything? The reason is that the internet has fundamentally changed, and UA was built for a web that no longer exists.

Universal Analytics was built around the concepts of sessions and pageviews. It was designed in an era where users visited a website from a single desktop computer, completed a "session," and left. It saw linear user journeys confined to a single device.

The modern user journey is far more complex. A potential customer might:

• Discover your brand through an ad on their phone's social media app.
• Visit your website on their phone later to browse.
• Add an item to their cart on their tablet that evening.
• Complete the purchase a day later on their work laptop.

Universal Analytics was notoriously bad at stitching this cross-device, cross-platform journey together. It would likely see this as four different "users" and four separate "sessions," giving you a messy and incomplete picture.

GA4 was built from the ground up to solve this. It's built on a flexible, event-based model. In GA4, everything is an "event" - a page view is an event, a button click is an event, a form submission is an event, a purchase is an event. This model allows Google to better unify the user journey across different devices and platforms (like your website and your mobile app), giving you a much clearer understanding of how a single user interacts with your brand over time.

Furthermore, GA4 was developed with a privacy-first approach, operating more effectively in a world with tighter regulations (like GDPR) and the decline of third-party cookies.

UA vs. GA4: What Actually Changed?

The move from UA to GA4 involves more than just a different name. The entire measurement philosophy, reporting interface, and key metrics have been reimagined. If you’ve logged into GA4 and felt completely lost, that’s a normal reaction. Here are the biggest shifts you’ll notice.

Data Model: Sessions vs. Events

As mentioned, this is the foundational difference. Universal Analytics grouped user interactions into timed sessions. Think of a session like a container holding everything a user did in one visit.

In GA4, every single interaction is captured as a distinct event. Instead of just a "session," you now have individual events like page_view, scroll, session_start, and file_download. This granular data lets you measure user behavior in a much more flexible and customized way.

Reporting Interface: From Canned Reports to "Explore"

Universal Analytics offered users a huge library of standardized, pre-built reports. In the left-hand menu, you could easily find reports for Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions that answered most common questions.

GA4 replaces most of these with a much smaller set of overview dashboards and the powerful but intimidating "Explore" section. Explore is essentially a blank canvas where you build your own custom reports and funnels from scratch. While this offers immense power and flexibility for deep analysis, it comes with a steep learning curve and means you can't just click three times to find the simple report you're looking for.

Key Metrics: Goodbye Bounce Rate, Hello Engagement Rate

For over a decade, marketers were obsessed with "Bounce Rate," the percentage of single-page sessions where the user left without any interaction. But it was a flawed metric. A user could land on your blog, spend ten minutes reading an entire article, find exactly what they needed, and leave - UA would count this as a "bounce" because they didn't click to a second page.

GA4 replaces it with Engagement Rate. An "engaged session" is defined as a visit that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least two pageviews. It’s a much more intelligent way to measure whether a user actually found your site useful, shifting the focus from "did they click again?" to "did they find value?"

Cross-Device Tracking Finally Unified

GA4 uses a blended method for identifying users across devices, leveraging User-ID (if you provide it), Google Signals (data from users signed into their Google accounts), and device IDs. This smart tracking allows GA4 to de-duplicate users who visit your site from different browsers or devices, providing a far more accurate count of your true unique user base.

The Deadline is Approaching: What You MUST Do Before July 1, 2024

Let’s be direct: time is running out. If you have years of valuable business data sitting in your Universal Analytics property, you have a limited window to save it before it's gone forever. Don't assume Google will keep it archived somewhere for you. You need to act.

Your number one priority should be exporting all of your historical UA data. You have a few options, each with its own level of technical difficulty:

• Manual Export from the UA Interface: The most straightforward method for small-scale exports. You can go into individual reports (e.g., Channels, All Pages, Source/Medium) and export the data as a CSV, Excel (XLSX), or Google Sheet file. The downside: This is extremely tedious and time-consuming for anything more than a few reports or a short date range.
• The Google Analytics Reporting API: For those with technical or developer resources, you can use the API to programmatically pull your data. This is the most robust and customizable method, allowing you to extract large volumes of data efficiently. The downside: It requires coding knowledge (like Python or R) and can be complex to set up.
• The Google Sheets Add-on: A great middle-ground option. Google provides an official Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets that allows you to configure and run reports directly from a spreadsheet. It’s more powerful than a manual export but much more user-friendly than the API.

Living in a GA4 World: Tips for Success

Once you’ve preserved your past data, it’s time to fully embrace the new platform. Moving forward successfully in GA4 requires a shift in mindset.

Get Comfortable with "Explore" Reports

Don't be afraid to experiment in the Explore section. This is where the true power of GA4 lies. Try building a simple Funnel exploration report to see where users drop off in your checkout process, or use the Path exploration report to visualize the most common journeys users take after landing on your homepage. It feels strange at first, but it is the key to unlocking deep insights.

Set Up Custom Events

GA4 automatically tracks a number of useful events, but you should configure custom events that align with your specific business goals. Are you trying to generate leads? Create a demo_request_submitted event. Is content your main driver? Create an ebook_download event. Taking the time to properly instrument your site will pay massive dividends in the quality of your analysis.

Integrate GA4 with Your Other Tools

Connect GA4 to your other Google properties, especially Google Ads and Google Search Console. The integration with Google Ads is even deeper in GA4, allowing for more intelligent audience building and conversion importing. For truly massive datasets, you can also set up a free integration with BigQuery to store your raw event data and run complex SQL queries on it later.

Final Thoughts

The sunset of Universal Analytics marks the end of an era, with the final piece - your historical data - scheduled for permanent deletion on July 1, 2024. The shift to GA4's event-based model reflects the new reality of a multi-device, privacy-focused internet. Preparing for this change by exporting your UA data now isn’t just recommended - it's essential for preserving your business history.

Navigating these platform transitions can be a headache, especially when you need to stitch together historical UA reports with new GA4 data and information from other platforms like Facebook Ads or Shopify. As we watched marketers grapple with endless CSV downloads and complicated VLOOKUPs, we built Graphed to be the solution. Our tool simplifies this by connecting directly to all your data sources - including GA4 - so you can use simple, natural language to create the dashboards you need in seconds, freeing you up to focus on insights, not manual data wrangling.