Two weeks left on Universal Analytics

On 1 July Universal Analytics stops processing new data. That is two weeks from today. Most of the accounts we touch are ready. The ones that are not tend to belong to businesses that read the warning banner in March, thought “we have until summer”, and then had a busy spring.

If that is you, nothing here takes a whole day. But the order matters, and one of these jobs cannot be done after the date at all.

What happens on 1 July, and what does not

Your Universal Analytics property stops collecting. The tag can stay on the page and nothing new arrives. Google Analytics 4 carries on collecting if you have it, and does nothing if you do not.

The old reports do not vanish that morning. Google has said the historical data stays available for a period afterwards, at least six months, and then it goes. So the interface is not the thing with a deadline on it. The comparison is.

That is the history you actually lose. GA4 only knows what it has collected. If your GA4 property started in March, you have no answer to “was this spring better than last spring” until next year comes around. Nothing recovers that, and no consultant can import it for you. The only fix is exporting the old numbers into something you keep.

Export this before the date

Set every report to your full date range, and pull it to a spreadsheet. Ten minutes each, one folder, done.

1. Monthly sessions and users by channel, for the last three years. This is the one that answers “is organic up or down” for the rest of your life.
2. Goal completions by month, and by channel if you had goals set up. If you never set goals up, skip it and do not go back to fix it now.
3. Top landing pages, by sessions and by conversions, for the last two years. This tells you which pages ever earned anything.
4. Top organic landing pages specifically. After a core update you will want to know what the site looked like before it.
5. Ecommerce or transaction reports, if you have them.
6. A single annual summary tab you type by hand: sessions, leads and calls per month, three lines a year. It is the least sophisticated thing we ask clients to do and the one that survives every platform migration there will ever be.

Two things you do not need to export. Search Console keeps sixteen months of query data on its own and is not affected by any of this. Google Ads keeps your ad history in Google Ads; the Analytics view of it is a copy.

If GA4 is not collecting yet, this is the week

The short version of a job we have written about at length. In order:

• Create the property and install the tag, through Google Tag Manager if the site already has it, otherwise the connected site tag.
• Open realtime, load the site on your phone, and watch yourself appear. Half the broken setups we inherit were never verified at all.
• Set data retention to fourteen months. It defaults to two.
• Exclude internal traffic, so the office does not count as demand.
• Tag the four things that are actually leads: a form submission, a tap on the phone number, a click on the booking button, a request for directions. Mark exactly those as conversions and nothing else.
• Link Google Ads and Search Console.

Do not turn the old tag off when you are done. Leave both running until the first, then leave the Universal Analytics tag alone entirely; it will stop mattering on its own.

One more thing to check in Google Ads. Since April Google has been auto-migrating Universal Analytics conversions into GA4 equivalents for accounts that had not moved themselves. Open your conversion table and look for the same action counted twice, once from each source. Two versions of the same lead, both marked primary, will quietly double your reported conversions and teach Smart Bidding something untrue. Keep one, set the other to secondary.

The website jobs that come with it

Measurement migrations are where local sites lose conversions quietly, and the failure looks like a slow month rather than an error message.

Test every embedded form and booking widget after the tag goes on. If the submission happens inside an iframe served from another system, it does not fire an event on your page without extra work. This is the single most common gap we find, and it is the one that makes a practice think its ads stopped working.

Check that the phone numbers on the site, in your listing and in your ads all agree, and that taps on them are tracked. For most local businesses the phone is still where the lead lands, and an analytics argument about sessions is happening one floor above the real problem.

And a note from Apple’s developer conference two weeks ago. iOS 17 adds Link Tracking Protection, which strips tracking parameters from links opened in Mail, Messages and private browsing in Safari. If you send appointment links or campaign links by text, expect some of that attribution to disappear this autumn. Another reason the numbers worth trusting are the ones your own system records at the moment somebody books.

What to do this month

• Export sessions by channel, goal completions, and top landing pages for your full history, this week, into one folder.
• Start the hand-typed monthly summary sheet, with last year and this year filled in from those exports.
• Verify GA4 in realtime from a phone on the live site, and fix data retention and internal traffic while you are in there.
• Confirm your four lead actions fire, especially anything inside an embedded form or booking widget.
• Open Google Ads and remove duplicate conversion actions left by the auto-migration.
• Leave the old tag on the page and stop thinking about it after the first.

Two weeks is enough time to do this calmly. If the measurement is tangled up in an old site, a pile of plugins and a form nobody can find the tracking for, the honest answer is usually that the website needs sorting before the analytics does. We tend to do both at once, because a clean Google Ads account and a clean set of conversions are the same job, and so is proving that the local search work is paying for itself.