You should switch to Google Analytics GA4 Today. And here’s why…

Why year-on-year data is important 📈

Year-on-Year data is an invaluable reporting tool to not only see how your business is performing online, but also for strategy moving forward. YOY analysis gives you real insight into the monthly trends and fluctuations in interest, purchases and more over time, within an annual period. This allows you to plan ahead and use this information to inform your sales and marketing strategies.

For example, you might see, from year-on-year reporting, that the number of enquiries or sales via your website drops every June consistently every year, then gradually increases over July and then spikes up in August.

This information is invaluable. It can give you the missing puzzle piece that explains why your conversions are down during that month vs previous months — preventing you from incorrectly writing off a particular sales strategy, marketing campaign or social media effort as ineffective.

And it gives you the power to design marketing activities and campaigns that you can leverage to gain more interest and conversions in the months you traditionally see a drop in sales. A 25% off deal for the month of June could be the carrot that gets your consumers over the line in a time they traditionally wouldn’t be motivated to buy.

Year-on-Year data also gives you a solid basis for benchmarks. Want to increase your business performance over the year? Aim to beat last year’s monthly outcomes on a YOY monthly basis.

How year-on-year data is impacted by the phasing out of
Universal Analytics 👋

Universal Analytics will stop tracking as of 1 July 2023. This will force a move to GA4 for anyone that is still using UA at that point.

GA4’s metrics, reports and tracking are quite different to Universal Analytics (more on that later), but this means when looking at the data in the Google Analytics Universal Analytics version, versus that of the new GA4, we’re really not comparing apples to apples.

(Or, for a more relevant analogy, we’re not comparing cookies to cookies — see what we did there?) 🍪

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has refined and redefined some of the core metrics that were a previous focus in Universal Analytics. Largely based on the number of website followers, and the ‘bounce rate’ of a certain page or the site overall, there were many factors that could skew this data or result in the wrong metrics being focused on.

We’ll delve deeper into this later. However, the point to note is that many of the metrics are different, and the count of these metrics is also not comparable when you look at UA vs GA4.

Therefore, we’re not able to get accurate data for Year on Year, when we use Universal Analytics to compare metrics up until the first of July 2023, and GA4 to compare metrics from that point onwards. For the best comparison, you’ll need to look within one platform. As Universal Analytics will not be available to do this moving forward, the answer for the best comparison lies in using GA4 for this YOY comparison.

Our recommendation is to get set up with GA4 now, start tracking everything you’ll want to track, and continue using both GA4 and UA side by side until you’re comfortable with GA4 and the updated reporting and visibility (or until you no longer can use UA — whichever comes first).

Preserving your Year-on-Year data is easy —at
least for the base metrics

As our technical lead and reporting gurus say, the most important thing to act on right away is to get that tracking in GA4 happening.

Let’s face it — GA4 is a fair bit more complicated to do the advanced reporting. We can handle that for you. But what is important — and relatively easy — is getting the base tracking for GA4 set up, so you can gather that year on year data, at least for the base metrics. We can handle that for you too. 😊

It’s as simple as getting your GA4 tracking set up. You can leave your Universal Analytics code and tracking in your website. But simply adding the GA4 tracking and getting it set up will give you a lot of insight in the future when GA4 is the only option. Because when that enforced switch happens, this way you’ll have some ‘historical data’ in the new platform.

Getting your more advanced tracking set up

Of course, it’s better if you can get everything you’d like to track set up to start gathering data in GA4 now — including conversions, engagement metrics, user flow paths, conversion paths and more. Because, like with the base metrics, the earlier you set this up, the less loss of data you’ll have when you need to make the switch.

These additional metrics will take extra time and expertise to set up as more technical knowledge is required to define, track, set up and start reporting for the more advanced metrics. This is something we can help you out with at Excite Media.

But again, the thing you can do now, relatively easily and quickly is to set up your base GA4 tracking to get started with the basics, at the very least.

The time to act is now — to reduce the lost data year on year ⏳

As the first of July 2022 has already passed, this means that for those who are not yet tracking data with GA4, there will already be missing year-on-year data when the time comes to make the enforced switch from 1st July 2023.

This means that for every day, week or month that passes, you’re losing comparative year-on-year data in the apples-to-apples comparison within GA4 year on year. Yikes.

If you’re not yet tracking in GA4, here is our recommended course of action:

1. Set up, or get help setting up, GA4 in its base form
2. Get some help with setting up the other important metrics for you to track — engagement, conversions and more. If you need help in defining what these should be, our experts can assist with that.
3. If it’s important to you, save your historical Universal Analytics data before it is deleted. You could export all of the reports you’d like to keep now, and then schedule a reminder to do so again just before the data is deleted. That way, you won’t miss the memo when it’s about to be removed from the internet completely. (Or if you still do, at least you won’t lose everything).

Once those are all tracking in GA4, you’ve protected your future YOY data. Along with as much of your ‘year to date’, ‘quarter to date’ and ‘month to date’ data that you can at this point. These are the most important factors to ensure from a data preservation standpoint.