Google is switching off the analytics you know. Move now, not next June.

Google announced it in March: Universal Analytics — the Google Analytics almost every business has used since it opened its website — stops recording on 1 July 2023. Its replacement, GA4, is already there, and it is not an upgrade so much as a different product with the same name.

The trap is the date. A year feels like plenty. It is not, because the two systems count differently, and a business that switches next June will have a chart with a cliff in it and no way to compare this year with last.

What is different

• Sessions are out, events are in. UA counted visits and pageviews. GA4 counts things people do — scroll, tap, watch, buy. Better, once set up. Empty until it is.
• The numbers will not match. Users, bounce rate, conversions: all defined differently. Running both side by side for a year is the only way to learn what "normal" looks like in the new one.
• Nothing carries over. Your goals, your audiences, your history. Old data stays readable for a while, then it does not.
• The reports are yours to build. UA gave you fifty ready-made reports. GA4 gives you a blank canvas and expects you to know what you want to see. Most people do not, which is the honest reason so many dashboards are now empty.

The plan, in the right order

1. Create the GA4 property now and run it next to the old one. Two tags, both collecting. Cost: an afternoon.
2. Write down the five numbers you actually use. Calls from the site, bookings, orders, contact forms, and where those people came from. Not forty numbers. Five.
3. Set those five up as events and conversions in GA4, properly, and check they fire. This is where most migrations quietly fail.
4. Build one report with those five numbers, month by month. If it fits on a phone screen, it is the right report.
5. Export the history from the old property before it disappears — at least the monthly totals for the last few years — so future you can see the trend.

What this is really about

Most businesses never looked at their analytics because it was a wall of numbers nobody asked for. The forced move is a chance to fix that: five things you care about, measured honestly, read in three minutes a month. That is what "knowing what works" means. It was never supposed to be a dashboard.

This is the setup we run for clients — the five numbers, the one report, the monthly note in plain words. If you would rather not spend the afternoon, we will do it and hand you the report.