Three Important Watch-Outs to Know Before Upgrading to Google Analytics 4 (GA v4)
By: Pat Strickler
Since Google announced version 4 of Google Analytics (GA v4), I’ve only heard the positive side of what this means for everyday users. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great new features that I hope to cover in a future post, but I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss the negatives that no one is really talking about. Here are three important watch-outs to know before upgrading to GA v4:
1. Your Historical Data Will Not Carry Over
This was probably the biggest surprise and let down for me when I started investigating GA v4. While Google presents a flashy upgrade button in the interface, they fail to mention that all of your historical data will be stuck in GA v3.
While Google presents a flashy upgrade button in the interface, they fail to mention that all of your historical data will be stuck in GA v3.
Yep, that’s right. When you hit upgrade, GA will create a new GA v4 Property that is completely blank. This will make any historical reporting a real pain, and, unfortunately, you don’t have many options to avoid this. My recommendation is keeping your GA v3 Property intact for all historical reporting and treating your GA v4 Property as a clean slate on which to build your analytics altar. Speaking of data collection, you have your work cut out for you there.
2. The Way You Collect Data Will Need to Change
The way data is collected and stored in GA v4 is the biggest change over GA v3. While I think this change is ultimately great for the long term -- in the short term, it’s going to require a lot of work. If you are one of the few who uses the gtag collection method, then fortunately Google did a lot of the heavy lifting for you. That being said, I don’t recommend the gtag method because it only provides the basics and doesn’t allow for customization.
The way data is collected and stored in GA v4 is the biggest change over GA v3… [and] it’s going to require a lot of work.
I assume most of you either use Google Tag Manager or a hard-coded Universal Analytics script to capture your GA data. If this applies to you, then, congratulations, you have a lot of work to do. The work I’m referring to is restructuring your custom event data collection. With GA v4, Google ditched the old page/screen and event data schemas and has moved to entirely event-based data schema. Again, I think this is great for the long term, but it means you will need to reformat all of your existing custom events. Remember your friends ‘Event Category’, ‘Event Action’, and ‘Event Label’? Yeah? Well they’re gone. Replaced by ‘parameters’. You can send up to 25 of them with each event, sounds good, right? 25 is way more than 3. Wrong! Which brings me to my last watch-out.
3. There are New Limits on Your Data
You know how your cellular provider sells you on an ‘unlimited data’ plan, and then you actually read the fine print and find out all the ways they are throttling you? Yeah? Well Google is like your new cellular provider, and GA v4 is your ‘unlimited data’ plan.
Google is like your new cellular provider, and GA v4 is your ‘unlimited data’ plan.
I’m joking of course, it’s not nearly that bad, but there are some weird limits to keep in mind. Remember how I said that custom events now have 25 custom parameters. Well before you go collecting everything data point under the sun, you need to know that you can only view 100 parameters within the interface (50 textual and 50 numeric). These ‘registered parameters’ are a lot like Custom Dimensions in GA v3. So 100 sounds like a lot, right? Well, here’s the kicker. Even if a parameter is shared across multiple events, it needs to be registered with each unique event, and each time it’s registered, it counts against your 100 total. I know this will severely impact how I approach my data collection strategy, and I’m sure it will have huge ramifications for a ton of GA users.
If you find yourself unsure of how you should proceed with upgrading to GA v4, feel free to reach out to CompassRed for a free strategy consultation.
CompassRed is a full-service data agency that specializes in providing data strategy for clients across multiple industries.