Universal Analytics is a thing of the past. Google started the UA deprecation on July 1, 2023, and data stopped being collected for accounts little by little until everyone was cut off… But what are you supposed to do with the last 10 years of data?!
The good news: you’ll still be able to collect website data for free with Google Analytics 4.
The bad news: you’re going to lose your UA data starting in July of 2024 & GA4 starts from 0.
While this situation is less than ideal, we do have a solution. You can use SyncWith to back up your UA data to Google Sheets.
How to Backup Universal Analytics Data Using SyncWith
SyncWith is a Google Sheets Add-On that you can add to any sheet. Once the add-on is installed, you can backup your UA data by following these steps:
Choose the Google Analytics v3 connector
Login to your Google Analytics account
Select the Universal Analytics account you’d like to backup
Choose your property
Select the desired view
Set the time period to “All Time”
For the next steps, you’ll need to do a little bit of planning.
See the full tutorial on YouTube.
What UA Data Should You Backup?
The best way to determine which dimensions and metrics you want to pull into your report is to think about what your go-to Universal Analytics reports were.
For instance, let’s say you spent a lot of time looking at the Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium report.
If you wanted to replicate this report in the future you would choose the dimension “Source/Medium” and maybe a secondary dimension of “Landing Page.” Then you’d select the metrics in this report that you care about, maybe “Users,” “Sessions,” “Bounce Rate,” “Avg. Session Duration,” and “Goal 1 Completions.”
Side note: I’d recommend going ahead and taking inventory of all your favorite UA reports and gathering those dimensions, metrics, and filters as well.
Prepping your UA data to connect to Looker Studio
After you select your dimensions and metrics (see full list of UA dimensions and metrics on the GA dev site), you can technically run your report.
But, you can also add dimension and metric filters and/or add a segment. This is perfect if you want to pull very specific data. You could pull just organic data, data for purchasers, etc.
Once you have everything set up to your fancy, you just select “Next,” and you’ll be taken to the sheet settings. Here you have the option to schedule (which you won’t have to do because well, you’re not getting any more data), and you’ll have the option to show or hide the status row.
The status row allows you to see the last time the sheet was updated and it has a button you can use to refresh the data. But again, there isn’t going to be any new data so… No need for the status row!
Also, hiding the status row makes connecting to the sheet with Looker Studio much easier!
All that is left to do now is run your report.
Backup Daily UA Data
If you want to be able to do any sort of comparisons using Universal Analytics data, you HAVE to add in the date dimension. By adding in this dimension, you will receive the report data by day.
Something to remember is that this will bull a tooooon of data. So before you pull this data, consider all of the different combinations of your data.
How long did you have your property? Each day is one row.
If you add in a dimension like page, how many pages do you have? Each page gets a row for each day.
So if you multiply the days by the pages, that’s how many rows you get and so on…
Collect it before you need it
Remember, starting July 1, 2024, Google will be getting rid of people’s Universal Analytics data. It’s best to collect the data now. You don’t want to stress about it and you don’t want to forget - so get to it!