Your historic Google Universal Analytics data is being deleted - here’s how to save it in 5 minutes.
This week, Google Analytics users received an email reminder of the the upcoming deletion of UA data.
🤔 What does this mean?
From July 1st, you will no longer be able to access your historic Universal Analytics website data, losing your chance to see multi-year trends in your brand data (eg seasonality, historic channel and campaign performance etc)
But there’s a very simple 5 minute solution that Google recommends, that I walk through in the video and below.
⭐️ Here are the steps to export a historic daily report into Google Sheets, going back as far back as you need:
1️⃣ Open a new Google Sheet with the account you use Google Analytics on.
2️⃣ Go to Extensions - Add-ons - Get Add-ons
3️⃣ Find and install the Google Analytics extension
4️⃣ Go back to Extensions - Google Analytics - Create new report
5️⃣ Name your report eg Brand Daily UA metrics & choose the account / view
6️⃣ Select Metrics: Sessions, New Users, Bounces, Session duration, Transactions, Revenue and Dimensions: Date
7️⃣ Change start date to when UA data was first collected, and remove row limit
8️⃣ Go back to Extensions - Google Analytics - Run report and it will populate into the sheet
Now you have the historic data saved to review later, and to eg import into Looker Studio to see a YoY view alongside your GA4 data.
🙋♂️ What if I have a few brand accounts I need to do this for?
Just copy and paste the report column, change the View ID which you can find in Admin - View Settings, and press run.
🙋♀️ What other metrics should I save?
Other useful reports would be to add channel groupings by date, campaign performance, countries and mobile / desktop split. Google Analytics has also released a template for many common reports so you simply need to change the view ID and date, and refresh. You can find their template here: support.google.com/analytics/answer/13851096?sjid=9403697970530957504-AP#howto
💡One tip: Don't export users, conversion rate, bounce rate, avg session duration as these don’t sum when aggregating over different time periods. Instead, calculate them in Google sheets or Looker Studio (eg Bounce rate = bounces / sessions)
🏃 Do it now before you forget - it won’t be there after July!
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5 апр 2024
