GA: what UA data should I save?

We’ll lose our GA Universal Analytics data in the beginning of July 2024. This post gives ideas on how to to capture the right UA data for those of you who don’t have unlimited time and budget. It’s written for content-driven sites, if you work on a commerce site you’ll probably need more comprehensive data.

If you need help capturing the right UA data, feel free to get in touch with us for a chat.

What UA data should I save?

Consider getting a year’s worth of data from the period before you set up your GA4 account, including:

Monthly list of top 100 pages + page views, landing pages + sessions, and search terms + event volumes.
Top traffic sources: consider monthly lists to note variations due to marketing campaigns and seasonal trends.
Monthly volumes for sessions, active users, new users, and page views.
Monthly conversion (key event) volumes, and lists of things like top download file names, page locations of contacts etc – the context that you need around your conversions.
Top browsers, operating systems and devices.
High level data for the performance of marketing campaigns, projects, key user journeys and new content will help you show the results of your efforts and inform work in future.

I want to keep all my UA data!

You might be tempted to save all your data. Unfortunately this option is too expensive for most of us. First you need to migrate your data to a platform like BigQuery, which will cost at least a few grand. Then there’s the ongoing cost of maintaining the database, and the technical resource needed to get the data into a usable format. Most organisations can rule this option out immediately.

Do I really need to keep any UA data?

If you set up your GA4 account before July 2023 you’ll have a years’ worth of comparable data. This will give you a sense of seasonal variations, and provide comparison data if anything changes.

If this is you, consider whether you need to capture any more data.

UA data is collected and processed very differently from GA4 data, so they’re not comparable. If you need to save UA data, keep the data that shows high-level trends rather than fixating on exact volumes.

Can I use my performance dashboards?

Yes! Download or screenshot your automated dashboard reports for each month pre GA4 – this is an easy way to capture your high-level performance.

How do I capture the right data for my organisation?

Identify the key data points you need up front in a session with colleagues, or at least get agreement from everyone. Keep it simple. Don’t take a huge shopping list of data from everyone – it will take ages to collect and be unwieldy to use down the track.

Ask your team ‘What will we use this data to achieve?’ If the answer is ‘nothing’, it’s not worth saving. Try to choose the best data measure for each need, rather than listing all the data measures that may help. You’re looking for high-level indicators, not data for deep dives.

In your session, consider the following areas. Then you can show that you followed a robust process for your ‘UA data retention strategy’.

GA4 queries you’ve been asked in the last 12 months from colleagues and senior management.
Your digital plans for the next 12 months. For example, are you planning any marketing campaigns where past performance data would be useful?
Key events (conversions) for your website, for example contact form submissions, downloads.
Key user journeys – page views from processes with multiple steps, like applications.
Think about your user needs – what do people want from your website, and how does this change across the year? Retaining data for top pages and internal search terms will give you the basics.
Review my list of recommended data at the top of this post.

What if I don’t have the right data down the track?

You probably won’t be able to answer every Google Analytics question from the UA period. That’s OK, because unless you have the time and funds to retain all of it, it’s impossible to predict and store all the right data. Just show that you took a considered approach when deciding what data to keep.

How should I store my data?

For most of the data a simple spreadsheet will be fine. For discrete things like marketing campaigns, new content releases, and key user journeys, deeper analysis may be valuable. Bullet points are fine for this – for example for marketing campaigns record the performance of key traffic sources with landing pages, along with conversion volumes from each traffic source.

If you need help to save the right UA data, feel free to get in touch with us for a chat.

Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash