Measurement after Universal Analytics stopped

On Saturday, July 1, 2023 Universal Analytics stopped processing data. A week later the reports still open, the old numbers are still sitting in there, and nothing new is arriving. Ten years of Monday morning habit, and the meter has stopped.

A month before that, at its developer conference on June 5, 2023, Apple showed the other half of the story. iOS 17 arrives in fall 2023 with something called Link Tracking Protection. When someone opens a link inside Mail, inside Messages, or in a Safari private window, tracking parameters on the end of that link get stripped out before the page loads.

Neither one is an emergency on its own. Together they finish a change that started when Apple began asking people whether an app could track them, and they settle an argument we have with clients every quarter: how much of “where did this patient come from” is something you own, and how much of it is borrowed from a browser that has decided to stop lending.

Here is what we changed on client sites in the weeks around the cutoff.

What actually stopped on July 1

Nothing on your site broke and no traffic was lost. What stopped is collection into the old property.

• Universal Analytics no longer processes new hits. Anything happening on your site today is recorded only by Google Analytics 4, and only if GA4 is installed properly.
• The old reports are still readable in the first weeks after the cutoff. Google’s position is that you have months to get the data out, not years.
• Anything you compare year over year has to come out of the old property as a file. Next spring you will want to know what last spring looked like, and the only place that number lives is a property nobody is maintaining.

If GA4 has been running alongside since 2022, the week of the cutoff is uneventful. If GA4 only went in during June 2023, your first honest year over year comparison is a full year away. Better to say that out loud early than to be asked for it in March.

What Apple announced in June 2023

Link Tracking Protection is narrower than the headlines made it sound, and it still matters.

It applies to links opened in Mail, in Messages, and in Safari private browsing on iOS 17 and the new Mac release, both due in fall 2023. Apple removes the parameters it considers user identifying from the URL. The link still works. The page still loads. The tags on the end that told you which email, which text and which campaign produced the visit are gone by the time your server sees the request.

For a local business the exposure lands exactly where you would not want it. Recall emails and newsletters. Appointment reminders. The “here is the page I mentioned” text the front desk sends after a phone call. Those are your own audiences, the ones that took years to build, and they are the visits most likely to start arriving labeled as direct traffic.

Regular Safari browsing is not affected in what Apple announced. We are not treating that as a promise.

The rule we are working to now

If you want to know it next year, collect it yourself, into a record you control.

That sounds obvious, and it is not how most local sites are built. Most of them outsource memory. The ad platform remembers the click, the analytics tool remembers the session, the form tool emails a copy to the front desk, and nothing anywhere writes down that the person who filled in the form on Tuesday sat in the chair three weeks later. When the platforms get quieter, a business built that way loses the ability to answer basic questions about itself.

What we changed on client sites

Six things, in the order we did them.

1. Source fields on every form. Hidden fields capture the first landing page, the referrer and any campaign tags when someone arrives, and they ride along with the submission. First touch and last touch both get stored on the lead record, not just in a report.
2. One tracking number per channel, logged to the same record. Calls from the ads number, the listing number and the site number arrive in the CRM with the caller and the source attached, so a call is a lead with a name on it instead of a spike in a chart.
3. Conversions renamed to match the business. Not “form submission”. Consultation requested, appointment booked, call longer than sixty seconds. If a name on that list does not describe something that makes money, it is not a conversion.
4. Booked work sent back to the ad account. Once the CRM knows which leads became appointments, those outcomes go back into Google Ads as offline conversions, so bidding is chasing booked work rather than contact forms.
5. A “how did you hear about us” field, asked once. It is unreliable and it is still the only source of truth that survives every browser change. We read it as a tiebreaker, never as a number.
6. Enhanced conversions and server side tagging where the setup is worth it. On sites with real ad spend, yes. On a practice running one brand campaign, that time is better spent on the first two items.

What we stopped promising

We stopped promising that the platform numbers will reconcile.

Google Ads will report more conversions than the CRM shows leads. GA4 will report a third number, and direct traffic will grow for reasons that have nothing to do with your marketing. A monthly report that spends two pages explaining the gap is a report nobody reads.

So the client facing number is now the one from the CRM: leads, contacted, booked, showed. Platform numbers sit underneath it as directional evidence for where to move budget. In the accounts we run that has made the conversations shorter and better.

What to do this month

• Export the Universal Analytics reports you actually reference before the old data goes: sessions by channel, top landing pages, conversions, the last two full years.
• Open GA4 and check that every conversion listed there is an event you would defend in a meeting.
• Add hidden source fields to every form on the site, including the ones on landing pages you forgot you had.
• Get appointment outcomes into the same system that holds your leads, even if the link is a weekly export for now.
• Decide which single number goes at the top of your monthly report, and keep using it in the months it looks worse.

None of this is interesting work. It is the part of a website nobody sees and everybody depends on, and it is why we treat the CRM as measurement infrastructure rather than a mailing list. Once booked work is flowing back into Google Ads, reporting stops being an argument about tools and becomes an argument about the business, which is the one worth having.