Tiny Bites: Don’t Lose Your Universal Analytics Data

Foreign. Welcome to the Tiny Bites podcast episode. This is going to be a short and helpful one, but welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me here. I'm excited to talk about this.

Yeah, so you've been talking about this a lot with the Clarity team. You've been doing some webinars, a lot of questions about it. It's kind of right in squarely in the world that Clarity operates, which is like data and analytics. But before we get into the specifics of this kind of problem of universal analytics data going away, let's roll the tape back a little bit and just give some context for who you are, maybe a little bit of background on Clarity, and then we can dive into some of the specifics here.

Yeah, sounds great. So my name is Ben Holland. I am the general manager for Clarity. I've been here since 2020. I think is when we started working together. And the idea behind Clarity was really those that create content get better insight into what's going on and to help them manage it. I have a background in data analytics, so I got my master's degree in business analytics from Arizona State University. And I will also add, I joke about this all the time, that even though I have a data analytics background, it's still challenging to figure out what things mean in Google Analytics. But. But that's beside the point.

Yeah, but a lot of the reason why Clarity exists, you know, we're bringing in Google Analytics data, bringing in Google Search console Data, bringing in WordPress data, and then that's a, that's a lot of data. And then kind of what you and the team work on is like, how do we make that as actionable and as simple as possible? Because as we all know, like more information, more data, more complexity doesn't always necessarily mean better. And so it's taking all that information and distilling it down into kind of actionable, insightful information. And we could talk ad nauseam about all the ways to do that within Clarity, but one of the things that we want to focus on right now is the specifically the tool set of Universal analytics and GA4. So Google Analytics 4, and then clarity's ability to kind of merge those. But also before we talk about kind of that problem and solution, let's talk about why that's important to even do that. So what's happening? It's coming. It's right around the corner here. What's happening and what should publishers, bloggers, anybody who uses Google Analytics be aware of? That's right around the corner here.

Yeah. Yeah. So good question. So Google released Universal Analytics a long time ago, and they've had different versions of it. Right now, what was called GA3 is also referred to as Universal Analytics. If you were a content creator in the last year or so, then you remember that last year, 2023 and July 1, Google stopped collecting data for Universal analytics. And there was a big push to basically set up GA4. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site, you probably got a lot of emails, a lot of notices, hey, you need to connect the GA4 property, things like that. The purpose behind it all is Google is changing the way they collect traffic data and connect users to each other. And so with GA4, it's a pretty big shift in the way that they collect data and, and present it. And so there wasn't really a simple, hey, yeah, this old version just kind of translated into the. Translates into the new version of how we collect it. They wanted to make a clean break. Last year they said, hey, you got to set up GA4 or you're not going to see any data on July 1st of last year.

And people can remember that there's this big transition over. You had to make sure that you had it set up. And then for anybody, if you're envisioning Google Analytics, it's not like that data just then merges with your old data. It's like a new instance of your Google Analytics data. So you look and like at your old data, UA4, it's like all of your traffic. And you know, for a site like Pinch of Yam is like 10 years of traffic. And then it just, like there's a cliff and it stops. That's when data went away collection around ua, Universal Analytics. And then similarly, as soon as you set up GA4, that's when that started. And so for some people, hopefully most people, they set up their GA4 instance, you know, before Universal analytics stopped collecting data. So there's some overlap there. So you could kind of bounce back and forth between those two. So let's talk about as far as you know, what does that mean? Like July 1, 2024, Universal analytics data is going away. Does that just mean like you then you log in and it's not there anymore?

Yeah, so. Good question. So last year we spent a lot of time on the clarity side, really trying to figure out how do we make sure that this is a seamless experience. So UA data, like you said, there's a cliff. And then GA4 data will begin collecting whenever you connected it. And so we tried to make that a very seamless experience. It is a separate property, like you said. So GA4 is its own property. The old UA is its own property in Google, In Google Analytics, in the Google Analytics console. Yeah. And what Google, I guess during all of this evaluation and investigation, we realized that like, Google really doesn't like to store old data. They don't like to waste the storage space. So in a lot of ways they do sampling to get away with that. They, you know, they'll, they'll like keep just parts of data to give you directionally what's happening, but they don't always store all data that's ever been captured. And so I think it's with that mentality that Google is coming a year later Now. So on July 2020, July 1, 2024, Google will be straight up deleting all UA data. All of the data that has been collected for could be over a decade, like you mentioned with Pinch of Yum is just going away. It's being deleted and there's red alerts everywhere. Make sure you migrate it, make sure you do something with it. And that's, that's sort of where we're seeing that, you know, hey, we, we kind of thought about this a little bit ahead of time with Clarity, knowing that this could potentially be the case.

Yeah. And let's talk about two different ways to approach it. One is, let's say if somebody doesn't use Clarity, it's not a tool that they have. Or maybe if people do use Clarity and they want to be kind of redundant or get as much of that data as possible. We went through this process you helped with, where we essentially did like a data dump. Even if we're not going to actively like use that data, we want to have it available just in case. It's kind of a technical process. But maybe people have somebody technical on their team that they work with and they want to make sure that they reserve this data. Let's talk about that instance. Can you talk about what that looks like, how that works kind of at a high level. You don't obviously have to get into like the technical elements of what it looks like.

Yeah. So if you log into the analytics console, you know, analytics.google.com, you'll see a red pop up often with a countdown timer. It's very ominous looking. And there's a button that's like, learn more how to migrate your data. And we spent quite a bit of time kind of exploring all the options. The thing that I think is frustrating is that Google doesn't really give you this like one click button download everything. And I think a lot of the reason for that is that their data is so complex and multifaceted, multidimensional behind the scenes. So when we started kind of going down paths of okay, well there is data we still want to, we know we want to store somewhere. You know, we have the traffic in clarity. We, you know, clarity does store its own version of that. So it's not going to disappear on July 1st. But there's all these other reports and dimensions and metrics that we wanted to capture. So Google has some instructions for to use a Google Sheet add on that. The Google Analytics Google Sheet add on that's probably the most user friendly. The challenge is you have to know how to like how to build a report. Because essentially what Google says is you can download a report, but you can't just download the raw data. You have to create a report. And a report is created using a dimension which is usually like, you think of it as like the pivot point. So like a date would be a dimension or like a page would be a dimension. And that really tells you, okay, what is each row? What's what separates each row. And then you have to select the metrics. So those would be things like sessions, page views, users, you know, bounce rate, things like that. So those would be a lot of times just a number. So in the Google Sheets add on you can do that. You have to do it in sections because the Google Sheets does have a limit of number of rows. I think it's 5,000 rows. So if you have an older site or if you pick a dimension that goes pretty far back, you're going to hit your limit really fast. There's also, I don't want to get too deep in the weeds on this one, but there, there is, if you do have a friend who's technical or knows anything to do with data, there is a company called fivetran. It is a data extraction and transformation and loading tool. It's F I v e t R-A-N.com and they do have a Google Analytics connector and we ended up going this route. What you need to do is set up the Google Analytics connector in FiveTran and then you also need to create a Google Cloud BigQuery database. Again. I, I'm sure people's eyes are glazing over, but people have, when you, most.

People have fallen asleep by now. No, yeah.

You can do it that way.

As a quick side note, I was watching the Apple event with a friend. I was like, let's do lunch and watch the Apple event. This is a friend. Nate is actually Nate, who does snack dive with Lindsay. I was like, oh, it'd be really fun. And at one point they were talking about, like, the new features and updates and. And I heard him, like, pretend snoring next to me. But I. But I think it's important to point out because it is. It's not like somebody's who's listening to this, who's like a food creator and, you know, doing the photography and recipe development will then know Fivetran and BigQuery in the connection. But to your point, to have that information, if they do have somebody who knows this or is technical to say to kind of point them in the right direction. So I think it's important to point it out.

Yeah. And that's like, generally as deep as I'll go on that. We do have some Clarity workshops that do go a little bit deeper and we. And we have some videos. If you want to reach out to the Clarity team, we will absolutely send those out. I don't necessarily want to overload fivetran by any means, but it is an opportunity and the only problem is it does take some time. So I think it took us about a week to get all of the data syncing because Google has API thresholds and other things and we're kind of troubleshooting different reports. But the Google Sheets connector is pretty quick. It is challenging to kind of configure and set up the reports you want. But then the 5 tran to BigQuery, if you're just like the kind of person that, like, hey, I just want to take this and store it in the attic and I don't know if I'll ever look at it ever again, but I want it. Then the 5 tran is another good option if you have somebody technical that can help you with that.

Yep. And that's like, kind of like you said, you know, it's. It's taking all those files almost like I think of it in the world of taxes. It's like you don't want to get rid of them. It's not like you throw them out every year because you might need to keep it around and refer back to them and who knows the reason why? But it's just nice to have that data. But you also don't necessarily want to spend a bunch of time like fine tuning another instance to allow you to, like, analyze all of that data if it's going to be resource intensive. So you talked about the Google Sheets option. Where there'd be a connection there. There's the bigQuery fivetran option. That would be more of like a connection into Google Analytics and exporting that, storing it. Clarity also has the ability to bring in some of that data and kind of smooth it over and have that available for historical analysis. Can you talk about kind of what that looks like and maybe the parameters around how much data is being brought in for anybody who is a Clarity user?

Yeah. So we are proud of the fact that Clarity does pull in its own version of your traffic data. So we'll pull in page views, sessions and visitors as far back as we can go through trial and error. We have kind of determined. I mentioned that sampling thing that Google does. We've kind of determined that Google kind of stops during page level data past about 26 to 36 months. It's really fuzzy. We've kind of loosely correlated it with a default setting of sampling data. So we'll go back as far as we can. Oftentimes it's only about 27 to 36 months. And then what we will do while you're setting up your Google account is we'll also blend it with your GA4 property. So we'll ask you for your UA property and then your GA4 property. And then Clarity is smart enough to kind of know when does one stop collecting and when does the other start. And then it kind of blends it together. So you'll see in Clarity and our existing Clarity users are super excited about this and use it all the time that there is no cliff, there's no gap in data. Unless you took some time after July 1st of 2023 to set up your GA4 property and there wasn't data being collected. Clarity automatically smooths it over and your data is there, your UA property and your GA4. And the best part is after July 1, in a few weeks in 2024, clarity will continue to show that UA data.

So it is Clarity brings it in, stores it. So it's kind of like a light version of that data dump where as much as possible it brings in. Can you say that again? It was page view session and page.

View sessions and visitors by post or by page. So all page level data for those.

Three, three metrics, as much of that of that's available. And like you said, Google does some purging of that data over time where you might not have that information to bring over, but if it is over, it's. If it is available, it's brought over. Essentially.

Yes. Yeah, got it.

And the key here, like in that instance, if anybody is a Clarity user, number one, it's important for them to make sure that they have both their UA connection and their GA4. So let's say if somebody signed up recently and you had Google Universal analytics and a GA4 account, would your recommendation be, hey, make sure before July 1st that you connect your UA account as well so that data can be brought in before it goes away?

Yes, I would highly recommend that you do that as soon as possible. We don't know exactly the time of day or when on July 1 that Google will delete the UA data, but we do know that it can take up to 48 hours to sync all of your data so into Clarity. Something into Clarity. So we would encourage you to do it as soon as possible.

Cool. And then if somebody signs up new, make sure that you connect both accounts as well. And ideally before July 1, when that would go away, because you want to bring that in and Then also have GA4 set up going forward. Is that right?

That's right. That's right, yes. Got it. And we have a special offer for those who are not Clarity users currently. Anyone that wants to join Clarity here before July 1st, if they go to clarity.com Google they'll get access to a special promotion and be able to get their first month of clarity for $1. So you can pull in all of your UA data and get access to Clarity. You know, can reach out to the team, join one of our workshops, get the most out of Clarity. But we just want people to be able to save this data before it's too late. So you get your first month clarity for $1. That's great.

Yeah, we talked about this idea of like, how do you set up a situation that's kind of like no brainer? And this is one of those. It's like there's no contract. You don't have to, you know, use it moving forward. You can make that connection, bring it in, get a feel for it, and if you're like, ah, you know, figure out another solution for the data or you know that if it's not the right tool for you, no pressure, but there's a lot of folks who are using it, really enjoy it, and you and the team have done a great job building that out through the years. So super important information. You know, obviously some different approaches for it depending on, you know, your level of need. Number one for the data, there might be some people who are like, I don't, whatever, I don't need it. But like, generally Speaking as much as possible. If you had that data, you never know when you might want to use it, how you might want to use it in the future. So figure out some way to do your best to like store that, have access to it moving forward. You know, we talked about the Google Sheets option, BigQuery, Fivetran, which we used Clarity making that connection and then that deal clash R-I-T I.com Google if people want to check that out. And then the date coming down the line, July 1, 2024. My guess is there might be a handful of people, Ben, who'd have questions about it. Or maybe the people who did fall asleep for 15 minutes and they're just waking up now and they're like, what did I miss? Like, if they want to reach out to you, the team, if they did have some follow up questions, if they're maybe confused about it. You also mentioned the webinar that you've done and being able to send that out if people want to watch it. Just whatever we can do to like help people out. What's the best way for people to connect with you or the Clarity team if they do have additional questions?

Yeah, the, the, probably the easiest thing is if you go to clarity.com C L A I R I T I.com and click on the little chat button, you can get directly connected to one of our team. You can also send a Note to support clarity.com or hello clarity.com and one of us will respond to you there in the, in the link that I, that I mentioned. Clarity.com Google we will have a link to our upcoming workshops. We have, I think one or two more workshops on this particular subject coming up this month. So we'll have those on the calendar there where you can sign up. So a lot of different ways. We love talking to our users, we talk to them all the time and we want you to reach out. So don't be afraid, don't be shy. We're here to help.

Well, that's great. You and the team have done a great job with Clarity, Ben. And if one of the, there's one thing that we've learned as long as we've been doing this, it's like this is just kind of the world we live in. Like technology changes, software changes, you have to like adapt to it. And as much as possible, if you can find the solution that makes it as easy as possible, you're in a much better place. So for those of you who are creators, solopreneurs, or maybe have a really light team that you can focus on doing the thing that you're really good at. And for most of us, listening, like, we're not really good at data or data science or working with BigQuery and 5tran, like, we're good at the content that we create or like, you know, thinking strategically in that world. And so it's great to hear solutions like this that make it a little bit easier. So I'll just say that one more time. Clarity.com Google we'll put it in the show notes and again, reach out to the team if you have any questions. Thanks so much for coming on, Ben, for the Tiny Bites episode. Really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.