Universal Analytics now has an end date

Last Wednesday Google put a date on it. Universal Analytics properties stop processing new data on 1 July next year, and Analytics 360 properties get about three months longer. Google Analytics 4 is the replacement. After the date the old reports stay readable for a while, and then they do not.

Nobody has to do anything this week. But the real deadline is not next July, and that is the part worth getting straight before the spring rush.

Why the real deadline is this summer

What you lose when Universal Analytics stops is not the interface. It is the comparison.

GA4 only knows what it has collected. A property that starts collecting next June produces its first useful year-over-year comparison the summer after that. If you want to know whether next spring beat this one, the property has to be running a full year before you need the answer.

So the deadline we give clients is the one we have used since GA4 became the default property. Get it live, verified and collecting the right events well before the busy season, with Universal Analytics still running next to it.

What Google actually said

• Standard Universal Analytics properties stop processing new hits on 1 July next year.
• Analytics 360 properties get roughly three months beyond that.
• Historical data stays available for a period afterwards, then it goes. Export what you care about.
• GA4 is not a new skin on the old thing. It counts events rather than sessions and pageviews, so the numbers will not match, and chasing the gap between them is a wasted week.

The order we run the migration in

We do this the same way every time, and the order matters more than the speed.

1. Create the GA4 property and leave Universal Analytics alone. Both collecting, nothing switched off. Anyone telling you to turn the old property off is costing you the comparison you are trying to protect.
2. Install it properly. Through Google Tag Manager if the site already has it, otherwise the connected site tag. Then open realtime, load the site on your phone and watch yourself appear. Half the broken setups we inherit were never verified at all.
3. Set the two things everyone forgets on day one. Data retention, which defaults to two months and should be fourteen. And internal traffic exclusion, so the office does not count as demand.
4. Decide what a lead is, then make it an event. For most local businesses that is four things: a form submission, a tap on the phone number, a click on the booking button, and a request for directions. Enhanced measurement gives you some of it. The rest is a tag, and a booking widget embedded from another system needs its own handling, because the submission happens inside the iframe and not on your page.
5. Mark those four as conversions and nothing else. Not scrolls. Not a pageview on the contact page. If everything is a conversion, the number means nothing and any bidding built on it learns nothing.
6. Link what needs linking. Google Ads so the conversions can be imported later, Search Console so the queries sit in the same place. Do not move your campaigns onto GA4 conversions yet. Import them, watch them next to the ones you already trust, and swap when the two agree.
7. Build three reports, not thirty. Leads by channel, leads by landing page, calls. Nobody running a local business has ever opened the other twenty-seven.
8. Write the numbers down every month. A one-page sheet with sessions, leads and calls per month, kept by hand, survives every platform migration there will ever be. It is the least sophisticated advice we give and the one clients thank us for.

The step most people skip is the fourth, and it is the only one that decides whether the new property is worth having. A GA4 property with traffic and no conversions is a chart of strangers.

What this changes about your website

Two things are worth doing while you are in there.

If your forms and booking widgets are embedded from another system, test every one of them after the tag goes on. Cross-domain tracking and iframes are where local sites lose conversions quietly, and the failure looks like a slow month rather than an error message.

And if the site is due a rebuild anyway, do the tagging after the rebuild, not before. We have watched three weeks of careful event setup disappear with a theme change. Get the pages right, then measure them.

One more thing that has nothing to do with GA4. Whatever you are counting on the site, the phone is still where most local leads land. If call tracking is not in place, or the numbers on the site do not match the ones in your listing and your ads, the analytics argument is happening one floor above the actual problem.

What we are telling clients

• Create the GA4 property this month if you do not have one, and keep Universal Analytics running beside it.
• Verify in realtime, from a phone, on the live site, before anyone calls it done.
• Set data retention to fourteen months and exclude your own office traffic.
• Tag your four lead actions, mark exactly those as conversions, and leave the rest alone.
• Link Google Ads and Search Console, import the conversions, and keep bidding on what you trust until the two sets of numbers agree.
• Start a monthly one-page record of the numbers you care about, by hand, this month.

The date gives you a full season to do this calmly instead of in a panic next spring. If your 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.