Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the future platform for Google Analytics. This is by no means breaking news today, but it sure was when Google began rolling it out in 2020. Now we’ve had time to compare the differences between Universal Analytics and GA4, and we’ve had time to plan for migration to GA4. Still, many companies haven’t made the switch, and this is an important agenda item because everyone will need to migrate before UA stops processing data on July 1, 2023 (read more about the UA sunset here).
Apollo is the fastest, most inexpensive way to migrate from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. It’s built for teams
- Who have more important things to do with their time than learn how to map UA events into GA4
- Who have limited resources to support their migration
- Who want the benefits of an analytics management system that serves as mission control to integrate and automate their analytics implementation for long term management.
(Beyond the Standard) Tips for Migrating to Google Analytics 4
Translating your existing Universal Analytics implementation into Google Analytics 4 isn’t an apples to apples switch. Previously, we shared three tips for planning your migration:
- Tip #1 – Document your business questions
- Tip #2 – Create a solution design with test instructions
- Tip #3 – Create a vision and set expectations
We hold to those tips and hope you’ll review the blog post that they’re drawn from. We also understand that your team is busy, and we want to help you move beyond tips into real solutions. That’s where Apollo comes in.
Potential Barriers for Migration to GA4
You might be facing a range of challenges related to migrating from Universal Analytics to GA4. First, there’s an architectural shift in moving to Google Analytics 4. The concept of an event has changed, and you’ve got to be careful to follow Google’s guidelines for naming your events and parameters.
Further, you might be feeling overwhelmed about how to prioritize this transition among competing priorities. Or maybe you’re struggling to find the time to learn the nuances of GA4, which can negatively impact your data collection now. Commonly, brands face a learning curve in understanding how to transition data collection to the event-driven model, and not all companies have the resources to make that—or the migration writ large—happen.
Migrations require stakeholder input, architects, developer resources, QA specialists, analysts, etc. They also require a team to have a firm grasp on what they’re collecting today relative to what they’ll need to collect in the future. Nothing makes a team feel so ill prepared to migrate as outdated documentation.
What if we told you that there was a platform that could help you with all these migration concerns?
7 Benefits of Using Apollo to Expedite Your Transition to GA4
Apollo is that platform. It provides the lowest barrier to entry for migrating or implementing in GA4. Here are just a few Apollo migration-specific benefits.
- Apollo aligns business requirements – GA4 does not provide you with clear business requirements before you start in with your tag manager configurations. Apollo lets you select from hundreds of business questions with predefined, best practice solution designs specifically for GA4 that you can leverage as a foundation for your implementation. We are aware of what’s required of your data in GA4, and we have built these aligned business requirements to support your GA4 implementation.
- Apollo automates your migration – In the migration from Universal Analytics to GA4, a lot of teams are going to struggle to migrate to an event-driven data model. Some teams may not have the resources or expertise to do this. Apollo automatically creates an event-driven data layer specification, which means you don’t need an architect to come in and manually design an event-driven data layer.
- Apollo automates GA4 tag manager configurations – With Apollo, you don’t need to set aside a bunch of time for a tag manager developer to go in and configure all the tags, triggers, or variables to support creating all your new GA4 tags.
- Apollo automatically integrates QA – Apollo automates data layer validation against schema requirements to address data quality. It validates every single data layer event push that gets put onto the event-driven data layer against schema requirements, and can help bring those to the attention of your developers to help them troubleshoot any data layer issues faster.
- Apollo assures an interconnected implementation – Siloed implementations are a concern for GA4 implementations, and Apollo acts as a mission control center to ensure that your business questions, solution documentation, and tag manager configurations are all telling the same story and that they’re all aligned.
- Apollo provides you with a solution design for your GA implementation. We understand that solution designs aren’t always used for Google Analytics implementations, but Apollo gives you the flexibility to do this easily.
- Apollo shows you how to configure your GA4 metrics and dimensions. Apollo doesn’t currently automatically do this for you (look for this feature soon!), but it templatizes the process, so that step becomes incredibly easy—essentially you just have to fill in the blanks rather than come up with the configurations from scratch.
Introducing the new Map Your GTM Apollo Feature
Apollo gives you the power to quickly and easily translate an existing Google Tag Manager Container into an Apollo property. This is good news for a few reasons.
- First, this allows you to add GA4 tags that utilize the existing variables and triggers you have already created in Google Tag Manager.
- Next, when you’re importing your existing implementation, you’re able to pre-select all the Apollo business requirements your organization is already using. By mapping your existing data points to Apollo’s data points, the business requirements related to the events and variables you’re already tracking will be automatically enabled in your new solution.
- Along with this, Apollo programmatically provides the updated GA4 data layer specification you need in order to track in GA4 the same tags that you’re tracking today in UA.
Note: to maintain parity with your existing solution, you need to map your existing implementation with this feature in Apollo before adding new business requirements. This is a great way to start building your organization’s business requirements list before integrating the other pre-made, best-practice business requirements in Apollo, which will help make your implementation even stronger.
Get all the technical details for how to use the Map Your Existing GTM feature here.
Along with developing breakout technologies like Apollo, Search Discovery has been a trusted Google Premier Partner and a Sales Partner in the Google Analytics 360 program since the program was launched in 2013. Today, that means that we’re among the top 3% of Google Partners globally, in the top tier of all Google Partners. We’re also a Google Marketing Platform Sales Partner and a Google Cloud Partner.
All that seriously earned advanced certification and trust from Google puts us in an excellent place to deliver end-to-end Google marketing and analytics solutions to help advance marketer maturity, which is a rare boon for clients.
If you’re ready to migrate to GA4, you couldn’t do it with a better partner than Search Discovery or with a better technology than Apollo.
