In-depth Step-by-step UA to GA4 Migration Guide

1. Introduction: Hi and thank you for enrolling on a journey to expand your knowledge of Google Analytics 4. I'm Ziga and I'll be your instructor for the next couple of lessons. By the end of this course, you will know exactly how to migrate your existing universal analytics to Google Analytics 4 without any trouble. We'll start with a quick overview of all the key differences between both analytics tools. Then we'll dive straight into how to migrate your accounts and how to structure them. Because GA4 account structure is different than UA, you should think about restructuring your existing setup. We'll show a few examples on how different businesses can structure their accounts so you can decide what is best approach for yours. Next we'll look at how to migrate your UA property to GA4, what settings you might need to change as well as how to transfer your account user rights. After that, we'll take a look at how to migrate custom events with native Gtag integration and how to migrate your Google Tag Manager containers. We'll also dedicate some time to understand how to migrate your goals and eCommerce data to GA4 conversions and how to migrate your Google ads. Lastly, we'll do a side by side comparison of universal analytics and Google Analytics 4 reports this way. You'll be able to quickly adapt to the new interface and reporting scheme. By the end of this course, you'll be confident enough to migrate even the most demanding universal analytics accounts to GA4. Okay, so who am I and why am I teaching you all this? Well, I've been in digital marketing for over 8 years and in this time I've launched, managed and mentored over 30 successful crowdfunding campaigns and helped them raise. Over $7 million, I've spoken at various conferences and marketing events and lectured multiple generations of small business owners on different topics of digital marketing. Currently I'm the head of marketing at a fast growing startup where I use data in analytics daily. In my decision making, I've been actively using universal analytics for my whole marketing career and I know how hard it was for me to get to use the new Google Analytics 4. I was responsible for migrating all my client's websites and a bunch of my own to the new Google Analytics 4, and it took me a while to figure out how to do the transition smoothly and understand all the little details. That is why I'm very excited to share everything I learned and tell you how you can simplify and speed up your migration process. If you're ready, let's get started. 2. Why Should I Migrate to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as Soon as Possible: The biggest reason to migrate to Google Analytics 4 is that Google will stop collecting data in universal Analytics on July the 1st, 2023. This means your existing reports and analytics will basically stop working. Since Google Analytics 4 will not import your previous data and will only collect data from the time you create it, it makes sense to migrate to it as soon as possible. This way. you'll have more data at your disposal in the new analytics by the time Google shuts down the old one. Also, by making the switch now, you'll have the opportunity to collect data in both universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, and you'll be able to compare the reports and learn the differences between them. This way you won't be surprised by the deviation in the reports in the future. Migrating now will also give you a headstart in understanding how Google treats data and how to think differently about your analytics Insights . Another major benefit of switching sooner than later is also tied to the new feature of GTA4, and that's machine learning. Machine learning helps to plug some of the gaps in your visitor's data as well as do predictive analysis. So the sooner you start collecting data, the more time the algorithm will have to learn your data, and the more accurate it will be. What you don't want to do is be caught off guard. And not be ready for the switch when the time comes. Remember that you will not only need to learn the new system yourself, but you will also need to teach and train your teams on how to use it. 3. How to Get The Most Out of This Course: Before we dive in, I just want to quickly explain how you can get the most out of this course. This course is divided into multiple lessons and even though each lesson builds upon the previous one, if at any time you see that you understand everything or your migration process doesn't require this specific knowledge, feel free to skip to the next one. If you're new to Google Analytics 4, I strongly suggest you start from the beginning and work your way. All the way to the end. This will ensure that you have the necessary knowledge for a complete migration process. At the end, I've prepared a short optional quiz designed to test your understanding of the most important concepts and remind you of the ones you might have forgotten. Try not to skip the quiz, as it's meant to solidify your newly acquired knowledge and help you recall it later when you need it. Let me just give you a few general study tips. Once you start the course, don't let days or weeks pass between lessons or you'll start forgetting what you've already learned. Set a schedule and stick to it. Trust me, having to go back and see through lectures you've already watched is a drag. Carve a special study space and eliminate all distractions. Then stick to it as you would in college. This space can be as simple as a desk with a chair. And maybe some background music. If you have any questions or problems during the course, ask them in the QA section on contact me directly. I'll be more than happy to help you. One more important tip, take notes if possible in an actual notebook. The physical act of writing will help you better retain the information. Last but not least, have fun and enjoy your learning experience. 4. The Key Differences Between UA and GA4: The first thing to understand about Google Analytics 4 is that it's essentially a ground up redesign of universal analytics. The reporting interface is significantly different from previous version. There are no views, only properties, and there are fewer predefined reports. This means that you need to accommodate a bit more time for the initial setup and have a good understanding of what reports your business really needs. But on the other hand, it's much easier now to create ad hoc reports more relevant to your business through explorations. The new reporting system also empowers you to create more advanced analysis and specific funnels based on any event captured in the analytics. GTA4 also unified the collection of data through data streams and thus allowing you to mix data from different websites and applications. This way you can get a more unified picture of what your users are doing across all different devices and platforms. You can think of each data stream as a raw view from universal analytics. Though views themselves are no longer available in GA4 and filters are applied at the property level. One of the biggest changes in Google Analytics 4 is the way it handles the measurement model. Instead of Sessions and page views to track data, it now uses events and parameters. Basically, every activity performed by the user is now considered an event. For example, a page view is an event that has detailed information such as location and time stored in parameters. This alignment allows for unified tracking across website and applications. There has been a few changes in how sessions are triggered and sustained. But the biggest one is that Sessions will be more consistent and won't restart at midnight or when a new campaign parameters are encountered. The next big change is also the unification of goals and ecommerce transactions. Both of them now became conversions. Basically you specify a conversion event for each action that you want to count as a conversion. For example, if you specify that the form submit is a conversion event, then a conversion will be registered each time a user submits the form. Unlike Universal Analytics which only counted one conversion during the session, GA4 will count them as many times as the event is triggered. One of the most interesting parts of GA4 is also the predictive metrics. With them, Google gives you a tool to better predict the future behaviour of your users, with metrics like purchase probability, churn probability and revenue probability. With Google Analytics 4, Google has refreshed engagement metrics by adding a new set of attributes: engage sessions, engage sessions per user, engagement rate, and engagement time. On a separate note, there is no bounce rate anymore. Instead, you can assume it to be the inverse of the engagement rate. There are many other minor changes in how things work, get measured, or are reported in GA4, and if you want to dig deeper into all the changes, I left a link to the documentation in the resources part of the lesson. 5. How to Set up Your Account Structure in GA4: Depending on your current setup, migrating to Google Analytics 4 can be super easy or a bit more complicated. It all depends on the complexity of your current universal analytics setup and your business requirements. Let's first explain the concepts behind the GA4 structure. Then we'll take a look at a few real world examples you can take inspiration from. If you're coming from Universal analytics, you're familiar with the concept of views. You use views to create separate collections of data, such as geographical separation, line of business separation, and so on. And GA4, you don't have views, but you can accomplish this kind of data separation. In different ways. The granularity to which you separate your data and how you control access to it depends upon your needs. You will need to set up your Google Analytics account differently if you have a small business with a single website or a large enterprise with multiple brands and thousands of products. Before we explain how the setup each of those cases, let's explain in detail the three pillars of your analytic structure, account, property and data streams. The account holds a collection of properties whose data is owned by a single linked entity and governed by a region specific terms of service. If you can centralise your data in one region, you will need just one account. If the data is owned by different regional entities, then create. Account for each region. A property which leaves within an account represents data for one user base like product, line, brand or application. For each user base whose data should generally be analysed together, use one property. This is also the level at which GA4 processes data and you can create links to other products. The last level are data streams. They live within a property. They are the source of data from your app or website. Create a data stream for each of the ways users interact with your business. At this level. You can also control the data collection features through the SDK or global site tag. OK, now let's take a look at a few examples of different businesses. We'll start with John. He has a small side project for bee lovers and he created a simple website to share his passion. Because he only has one website, he only needs one data stream. So his structure should look something like this. One analytics account, one property and one data stream for his website. Mary on the other hand is building a SaaS startup. Their main product is a web app for which they also have a marketing website and they have just launched their first mobile app on iOS. Because Mary's data is on different platforms, she needs three data streams and her structure should look like this. One analytics account, one property and then three data streams, one for Web app, one for her iOS app and one for her marketing. Website. Since she has all of her data in one property, it will be possible to see the whole customer journey of a user from the first touch point to the usage of her web and final mobile app. Let's now look at Ram. He runs the news media website with over 10 million monthly visitors and he also has a mobile app for iOS and Android. Since he wants to monetise all this traffic, he also created a dedicated portal for advertisers who want to promote businesses to his audience. Because Ram's business has two distinct user bases, he needs two properties. This is why here's analytics account should look something like this. He would have one analytics account with two properties. The first property would be for his readers and since they can consume the news either on the website or on the mobile app, he would need three data streams. One for his website, one for iOS app and one for the Android app. Then he also needs a property for advertisers, but since he only has one portal for them to manage their ads, he will only need one data stream for this property. Let's now look at the big ecommerce store from Julia. Her company owns three different brands, each having hundreds of products, and all of them are present in seven European countries. Her account structure would look something like this. She would need three properties, one for each of her brands. Then each property would need to have seven data streams. One data stream for each country that they address. This will allow them to have all their brand data in one place while separating audiences by country for advertising purposes. There are many more ways you can set up your structure, and it will greatly depend on your business needs. In general, you should set one account per company and one property per brand or business unit, assuming your brand's and business units are distinct operating entities with separate stakeholders or analyst groups, and then as many data streams as you need to capture all the ways users interact with each property. 6. Property Migration and Settings Overview: Migrating from Universal analytics property with the help of Google Analytics 4 setup assistant is Super Easy. Before we start, you should know that the setup Assistant Wizard does not change or modify your Universal Analytics account at all. So don't worry about your existing data. It also does not backfill your new Google Analytics 4 property with historical data and your GA4 property will only collect data going from this point forward. Okay, let's now take a look at how to migrate your property. First you need to make sure you have at least an edit role for the account. Then in your UA interface, click on admin, then under the property column, select the property you'd like to migrate and click the convenient button GA4 setup assistant. If you're doing this for the first time, you want to create a new GA4 Analytics property, but there is also the option to connect your UA property to existing GA4 property. If you'd want to do so. You can find it here below. Next you'll see what setup assistant will do. Next click create property and you are done . And you also get the option of enabling data collection. You can only enable this if you have implemented the data collection using gtag.js or your CMS supports this. If you are implemented to your data collection any other way, for example through Google Tag manager, then you'll need to do this manually before your GA4 property will start collecting data. Below you can see the new property name and property ID. Now let's go to your newly created GA4 property. The first thing you'll see in the setup assistant is the overview of what you have already done and what needs your attention. Because we haven't enabled the data collection yet, the data isn't flowing in. If for example, we look at another property that has this setup already, you can see that here the data is flowing in. Let's take a look at how you can set up your data collection first. As mentioned before, GA4 uses data streams to push the data to your property. So let's go to data streams. You'll see that the setup assistant already created a web data stream for you. I'm not going to go into too much detail on this screen, but all you need to know is that you can easily add multiple data streams here for different sources. Let's open now this data stream. The first thing you'll notice if you haven't set up the data collection is that you get the instructions on how to do that. You can get to this screen also here at the bottom. Google will give you detailed instructions for the few most popular CMS here, but they have detailed instructions for even more CMS in their help centre. I left the link to those in the lessons notes. But if you prefer, you can also install it manually. Similarly as you could with universal analytics. If you use Google Tag manager, you'll need measurement ID which is this code and you can also get it back here. Once you set it up, it might take up to 30 minutes before data starts to pour in. If you need to set up your cross domain tracking as well then you can do this here. One thing I want to mention really quickly is at this stage you can also set up enhance measurements. These are all the things GA4 automatically tracks on your website, and if for some reason you don't want to track something from this list, you can simply disable it like so. Let's now quickly go through some of the most common settings and where you can find them in the new interface. In the property settings you can now find some of the settings previously found in views like time zone and currency. In data settings you can find your data collection and retention settings. Also, the filters have been moved here so you can exclude the traffic you don't want in your reports. Their functionality stays the same as in universal analytics, but you are limited to 10 filters per property. You won't find bot filtering settings anymore as GTA4 now automatically excludes them. There is also no need to enable ecommerce reporting as they will be generated automatically. Basically, these are all the essential steps you need to take to set up your GA4 account. You can cheque all the changes in the GA Help Centre and I left the link in the lessons notes. 7. User Access Control Migration: If you have a simple access structure you just a few users that you need to migrate to GA4, the best option is to open both analytics side by side and just recreate all the users and their rights in the new GA4 account or property. You'll find those options in account access management and under property access management. But if your structure is a bit more complicated or you have lots of users and you don't want to create them one by one, Google has a tool that can help you out with that. We'll take a look at how you can do this, but I also left a detailed instructions from Google in the lesson notes just in case you need them. For this to work, you'll need an administrator. Roll on your account and you'll also need access to Google Sheets. The first thing you'll want to do is install GA4 migrator from Google Workspace marketplace. I've left the link in the lesson notes as well. You'll need to give it permission and after you do that we'll create a new Google sheet. Protip, you can create a new Google sheet just by typing the "sheet.new" in the URL bar. Next you'll find the GA4 Migrator under the extensions and we'll click on migrate users to GA4. On the right side, you'll select the UA account and property for which you want to import the users and just click the import users button. It may take a few seconds for everything to complete and then you'll be presented with a list of all users and their rights. If a user has admin rights for some views and non admin rights for others then you'll get a warning like this. In this case you need to decide which rights to assign to these users. If you want the most permissions for all of them then you can also use this button here if you don't want to migrate the specific users. And just delete that row. After you are done, you can go to Step 3 where all you need to do is select the GA4 property and migrate all the users there. After you are done, you can double check if everything is OK in the property access management and as we see everything was migrated successfully. 8. Custom Events Migration With gtag js: Let's first talk a little bit about the differences in event handling between both analytics. If you have ever set up event tracking in Universe analytics, you're likely familiar with the three descriptors you can use to describe the event, event category, event action, and event label. You could also send additional data in the form of custom dimensions and metrics along the event to segment them even more and that was basically it. Now Google Analytics 4 is based on different kind of event and offers a more flexible and agnostic data collection. Because the origin of this concept were in Google Analytics for Firebase. If you are already tracking your Android or iOS app with Firebase, you can basically instantly sync your project with Google Analytics 4 without any new configuration needed. As mentioned before, at the centre of the Google Analytics 4 data model are events and event parameters. This is a powerful concept as it gives you the option to send as many parameters as you wish for each event. For example, you can send only one parameter with one type of event and five with another one. Any parameters you send are also available for audience definition in your reports. A parameter can contain unlimited number of unique values, but unfortunately you're limited to 25 custom parameters per event and each parameter value can be up to 100 characters long. Let's now take a look at how to actually migrate your existing UA events to GA4. There are two ways you can approach this, fully migrating to GA4 and removing UA from your website or keeping UA tracking active and doing what is called dual tagging where you send events to both properties. If you have universal analytics implemented with gtag.js, your site will automatically send events to both your UA and GA properties unless you use. A parameter called "sent_to" in your event sending code. This parameter basically specifies to which property you want to send the event to. Events sent to GA4 are automatically translated to new event parameter format in the following way. Event action will become the event name in GA4, while event category and label and value will become event parameters. Because GTA4 tracks a lot of things automatically, we first want to check if any of our existing universal analytics events are redundant. We'll start by checking the enhanced measurement events if we see any events that we have implemented in our universal analytics. We should add a "sent_to" parameter to send them only to your UA analytics property. You can find these events under your GA4 data streams and enable or disable them as you wish. Next, we should do the same for all of the automatically collected events. You could look at the automatically collected events list to see which ones you should ignore. I'll leave the link to the list in the lessons notes. The rest of the events should be sent to GA4. There is however a recommended naming convention that Google suggests. So you should check the recommended event list and rename the events that match the ones on the list. The significance of recommended events is that they are treated a bit differently in the reporting interface and they will automatically populate the built in reports. If you use different event names to record your events, you'll need to. Create your own custom reports to read the data that you have recorded. Finally, if you cannot find a suitable equivalent event in the steps above, create your own custom event or leave the one you have set up in your existing UA. One last thing regarding custom metrics and dimensions, if you are sending them along your UA events, you can simply send them as extra parameters in the GA event. Then in the GA4 interface, you can create a custom metric or dimension based on this event parameter. 9. Manually Migrate Google Tag Manager (GTM) Tags to GA4: If you're using Google tag manager to set up UA and trigger different events, you'll need to migrate those as well. This lesson will take a look at how you can do that and what you need to look out for while you are doing the migration. The first thing you'll need to do is make a list of all the tags that send any data to your UA. This will help you track what you have already migrated once you start the process. The next thing you'll need to do is add GA4 configuration tag. You can simply go under tags and click new. Then click tag configuration. And here you can see we have two tags. GA4 configuration and GA4 event. We'll select the first one. Now let's get measurement ID from your GA4. You need to go under the admin section. And then under data streams. In clip on the data stream you wish to track. This will most likely be your website and here in the upper right corner you can see your measurement ID. Let's quickly copy and paste it in our GTM. By default, this configuration will also trigger a page view event. But if for some reason you don't want that, you can simply uncheck this option and the page view event won't be sent. Now let's trigger this tag on all pages. Once you've created this configuration tag, we can start migrating all other tags that send data to UA. Basically what you do is look at the tag that is sending some data to universal analytics and create an equivalent for GA4. Let's now just use an example on how to migrate the event when someone clicks on a button. Here we have this tag and you can see what is sent to UA. I would suggest you copy this event and then change the name. I like to add GA4 at the end of it so the same event groups together and I can easily see which ones I sent to GA4 already and which ones I haven't. Then we can change the tag type to GA4 event and select the configuration tag we've created before. The name of the event can be anything you like, but Google recommends using their naming convention. So cahck the list by clicking on learn more and see if there's anything appropriate for the event you're trying to migrate. We're going to name our event button click and then we can add some extra parameters. In the UA event, we stored click ID in the action and click text in the label fields. So let's just say we want to add a parameter button text and we can simply add it this way. This is the basic principle upon which you can migrate all the events from your UA to GA4. There are some events that you don't need to migrate because GA4 can automatically track them for you. If you want to see which events you can skip, you can go into your GA4 and under admin find your data stream, then click on it and under enhanced measurement click on this gear icon. Here you will see all the things GA4 can automatically track for you. As you see, there is no need to manually track scroll events anymore or outbound link clicks or even video engagements. So if you have them enabled in GA4, you don't need to migrate them in your Google tag manager. You can however track the manually if you'd like, or if you have some extra data attached to those events that is important for you to pass on. But generally speaking there is no need to have them in Google tag manager. After you've migrated all the events, I suggest you test it out first before deploying your GTM container to the production. 10. Automatically Migrate GTM Tags to GA4 Using Tools: If you want to simplify and speed up your GTA migration process, there are two useful tools that can help you migrate your tags, and in this lesson we'll take a quick look at them. Let's start with the simpler, more user friendly option called Tagmate. This tool isn't free, but it's super easy to use. Plus they give you 15 days of free trial which can you can use to test it out. I'm also partnered with them, though they are not paying me to promote them. I'll give you a quick tour so you can see how easy it is to quickly migrate your GTM tags. First, what you need to do is sign up with your Google account. Be careful to use the Google account that has access to the tag manager you wish to migrate. After you're logged in, go to the UA to GA4 migration card. Then simply click start project. Now we are able to add your GTM account and workplace. If you're doing this for the first time, you'll need to click on add new. Then you will have to grant tag mate all these permissions. You need to click all of them, otherwise you won't be able to continue. After you do this, you will be able to see your account, which you simply select and click next. Sometimes after you do this nothing will happen. So if this happens just refresh your browser page. Then on the dashboard you'll click the let's go button again and now you will see all your tag manager accounts, containers and workspaces connected to your Google account. You will then be able to select the one you wish to migrate. If you haven't yet created a GA4 configuration tag in your tag manager, you will need to do this now. You can name the tag whatever you wish. Then you need to add your measurement ID. You can find your measurement ID in your GA4 under the admin section and then go to data streams and click on a data stream you wish to add. Then in the upper right corner you have your measurement ID. Simply copy it and paste it into this field. For the initial settings, you don't need to set any extra fields or user properties. If however you already have a GA4 configuration tag, you will be presented with a step by step migration guide. So let's start with step one, standard tracking tags. Click on Explorer and here you will see the dashboard with some stats on how many tags are eligible for migration, how many you have already migrated and so on, as well as the list of all the tags you can migrate. After clicking on migrate for each tag, we will see all the details of this tag which you can modify if you'd like. There are three important fields you need to check. The first one is the tag name, the second one is the configuration tag you will use for this specific tag. In some specific cases you can have multiple configuration tags, but most of the time you'll just have one. And the third one is the event name that will be passed to GA4. If you want to use standard GA4 event names, please check their documentation on which tag names are available or you can do a custom event. Just remember that you are limited to Max 500 unique custom events. Just remember that you are limited to Max 500 unique custom events. If you are migrating events from UA then this tool will automatically adds the action and label as parameters to this event. If we want to change or remove them then you can simply do this here. Once you are done, just click the migrate button. It will take a few seconds and the tag will be migrated. After you migrate all the tags, you can return to the dashboard and continue to Step 2. In this step you will be able to migrate some of the advanced tags and ecommerce related tags which I currently don't have on this account. In the third step, it'll show you some other tags you can migrate. After you successfully migrated all the tags, you can now go to your Google tag manager while you see all the changes and publish them. The other tool is a free alternative, but a bit more complicated, and I won't go through everything you need to do to make it work, but all you need to know is that it gets a job done and it's free. This tool, or rather a script, is called GA4-GTM-migration and you can find it on the GitHub. I'll leave the link in the lesson notes. The detailed instructions on the GitHub page explain exactly how you can do the migration. Also, the Google Group they have is super useful if you get stuck in the process, so if you want a free alternative and are a bit more technical and not afraid of using Google Sheets then this script might be a good option for you. 11. Migrate Goals and eCommerce Conversion to GA4 Conversions: Google Analytics 4 allows you to make only 30 conversions per property, so it's important that you think about how many goals you have in your views and if some of them are similar enough to be merged into one. A Conversion in GA4 should only measure the most important events on your site or in your app. In UA you probably set goals for micro and macro conversions where macro conversion is generally referred to significant. Success section. An example would be a purchase for ecommerce website. Micro conversion on the other hand generally refers to a smaller success, one that may indicate a higher probability of a macro conversion at a later time. If we stick to the previous example, in eCommerce a micro conversion could be add to cart. GA4 has a better and more configurable funnel visualisation for tracking progress through the steps leading to a conversion so you don't need to migrate. The goals is to use to track micro conversions. We'll take a look at three types of goals and how to migrate them. Let's start with destination goals and event goals as these are the most common ones. We can use the goal migration tool in the setup assistant. Just go to setup conversions and click on actions, then import from UA. This will show you all the eligible goals that you can migrate to GA4. You can decide which goals you wish to migrate by checking off the ones you don't want to migrate, and you can also rename the conversion events if you'd like. Though Google will automatically name them according to their new naming convention. After you do this, you can cheque the conversions in custom events in the configure section. If you click on the create event, you'll see all the events that have been created automatically. You can see all the conditions for this event to trigger, and if you like you can simply change them here. All the events that are marked as conversions can be viewed here. You can also remove the event from the conversions if you'd like to. Let's now look at engagement goals, which won't be automatically migrated because they signal an overall threshold of engagement and not competition of specific action. And you can do that with existing event structure in GA4 There are two ways you can still track those. The first one is to simply use the user engagement event. Sort of as a proxy for average session duration. The 2nd way is to use an audience. Let's do this on pages per session goal example. First go under configure, then click on the audience. Next, we'll create a new audience and select a custom audience. Let's name it pages per session goal. Next, we want to set the scope to within the same session, and we can do this here. Then we need to define some conditions. We'll search for the event page_view and we'll add it. Then we'll also want to search for a parameter event count. And set it to whatever you want. For our example, let's just say someone visited more than two pages in the same session, so we'll set it to more than two. Next what we want to do is set the membership duration to a maximum and create a new audience trigger. We'll name it the same, just with lower case and underscores, then copy it and. Save everything. Will also save the audience. All we have to do now is create a conversion. So let's do this. Go under conversions. And click create new conversion. Paste the name of the audience trigger we created just a minute ago. If you haven't copied it, just retype what you have set. Now we will get a conversion for this specific engagement goal. The next thing I want to quickly explain is how migrating ecommerce data works. Basically, Google automatically translates most UA ecommerce events to GA4 and vice versa. This allows you to greatly simplify the transition to GA4. However, there is a small number of cases where events or properties won't be translated and your reports will not be fully populated with data. For the full compatibility list, check the link in the lesson notes. So what can you do? There are actually three ways you can go about this problem, and it all boils down to your decision. How much effort are you willing to put in today versus the future, and how important it is for you to have full data either in universal analytics or in Google Analytics 4. Let's take a look at what you can do and what are the pros and cons of each method. The first thing you can do is leave everything as it is and continue sending UA commerce events to both UA and GA4. The good thing about this is that you don't need to do anything at this point and you will still have both UA and GA4 ecommerce reports. The downside is that your GA4 reports won't be as complete as some events and properties unfortunately will not be translated. The second thing you can do is change all your UA ecommerce events to GA4 standard. This will allow you to have complete GA4 reports and still get data back to UA. But unfortunately now your UA reports won't be fully complete. On top of that, you'll need to actually transition to GA4 ecommerce events and this will require some upfront effort. The last option is to run your UA in GA4 ecommerce side by side. This will require you to implement the GA4 ecommerce events alongside your UA commerce events. Which again will require extra effort, but you'll at least have both reports fully functional. On top of the extra effort, there is also some extra performance penalty for sending duplicate data for each event. In the long run, you'll eventually need to do the migration to GA4, so I would say the best method is the second one where you substitute or UA ecommerce events with GA4. By the end of the day, it's your decision to make. 12. Google Ads & Audience Migration: Migrating Google ads link to New GA4 is super simple, so let's take a look at how you can do it. You just need to go to admin. Then set up assistant. Then Scroll down to Google ads. Next, just click on the actions arrow and click import from UA. Alternatively, you can go to Google adds links in the property column and click import. Here you can also manage your links and add new ones if you'd like. To finish the import, just click import selected adds links. Even though the GA4 and Google ads are now connected, you still need to import your conversions and add your audiences to add groups or campaigns if you want to leverage this data to optimise your campaigns. If you use Google signals in your universal analytics, you will need to enable it again in GA4. Next, let's import our audiences from UA so we can use them in our Google ads. You'll go about it in the same way you've imported user access control. If you skip that lesson, please watch it as we will skip a few steps here. Let's open a new Google sheet simply by typing "sheet.new" in the URL bar. You should have GA4 migrator already installed, so let's just go under extensions and GA4 migrator, then click on migrate audience definitions to GA4. In the right panel you'll again select your account and property and click import audiences. Next you will select all the audiences that you wish to migrate. Not all audiences might be eligible for migration as only audiences using concepts supported in GA4 are migratable. You can let Google decide which audiences are migratable by clicking this button. After you are done, you can select the property to which you wish to migrate these audiences and click migrate. Just a few notes, you can create up to 100 audiences per Google Analytics for property and unlike universal analytics audiences, this audiences automatically update everywhere rather than require you to select the destination. 13. Where in GA4 can I Find my UA Reports : In this lesson, we'll take a look at some of the most commonly used UA reports and where you can find them in GA4. I'm not going to go into details of each report, I'm just going to show you where you can find most of your old reports in the new GA4 interface. Let's start with the customization section. The closest thing to this in GTA4 is the exploration section where you can create custom reports and dashboards by. The reports you can create here are much more advanced and you can get deeper insights. The next section is real time, which you can find by going to reports and clicking real time. Again, the dashboard is a bit different, but you'll get all the information you're used to in one place. You can also compare different user segments or philtre this data by any dimension you wish and thus get a more granular overview of what is going on right now on your website. There's also a new section called Debug View which you can find under configure and this will help you see what is going on on your website at a more granular level in real time. The first thing you'll notice in the audience overview is that a lot of reports that you see in the UA are missing in the GA4. Some of them can be found elsewhere and some you can add or create by yourself if you need them. Adding new cards is super simple. Let's say you'd like to have a new card on this report. What you do is simply click customise report, then click add cards and select the card you wish to add. If we want to see how many new or returning users you have on your site, you will now find this report under the retention section. You also have here a cohort report as well as user engagement and lifetime value. The demographics and geographic section from the audience section has been moved to the user section below. You have your country, city, gender, age, language and interest segmentation all in one place and if you want you can go even deeper with the detailed report. The same goes for the technology section which is right here below where you will find all the reports regarding devices, browsers, screen resolution and so forth. If you're looking for the user flow alternative in GTA4, you won't find. There is no predefined report for this, but it's super easy to create in the Explore section. So let me quickly show you how you can do it. Go under Explore section, then select the path exploration template. I won't go into all the details of variables and depth settings as we will discuss this in another topic. But if you'd like to have same report as in UA, you just set the country to the breakdown section and now you have a very similar report as to default one. In UA you can click on a country and have the traffic from the country highlighted. You can change the event to the page title so it's clear on the path of the user. Then you can drill down to explore other steps as they have taken. If you want, you can save this report and return to it when you need it. I won't do this now, so let's go on. Next thing I want to show you is the acquisition section. You will see that in UA you have a lot of subsections, whereas GA4 you only have the default overview. But don't worry, it's super easy to get to most of these reports once you understand where to look. By default you can see two cards, users and sessions per channel grouping and under sessions you see the engage sessions. As we discussed in the previous lesson, there is no bounce rate in GA4 so you will use this instead. Then if you want to see the data based on source, medium, platform, campaign and so on, you can simply change it here. This corresponds to most of the subsections in the UA like source, medium, Google ads, campaigns, keywords and so on. If you have connected the search console to GA4 then you will be able to see all their corresponding reports like queries under the organic search traffic. You will also find groupings by landing page, country and device category. To get to the social data equivalent in UA, you would basically create a filter in GA4 that includes only social channels, then go to a report that you want this data for. For example, if you'd like to see landing pages from social, just go under engagement. Then pages and screens. Then click add filter. Select session default channel grouping. And choose the channels you wish to filter. In our case, we want to see, let's say, organic social, so I'll select this. Then you simply apply the filter and you will get this specific report. Let's go now to behaviour section. To get data for behaviour flow you would do the same as we did for user flow and create a report under the exploration. But instead of users you would do the breakdown by page name. Almost all the side content reports you can find under engagement and then pages and screens. You just click here and change by which dimension you wish to group data. The exception is exit pages, which you'll find under Explorer. What you want to do is select free form, then add a new dimension called page path. Then add this dimension to rows. Next search exits under the metric. And add it to report. Then simply drag it to value section. Unfortunately GTA4 doesn't measure side speed, so there are no reports for this section. You can however use some other third party tools to track your site performance. Site searches are a bit hidden and if you don't know where to look you would have a hard time figuring it out. If you have enabled site search under the enhanced measurements in the data streams, this event will be automatically generated. Otherwise you'll have to trigger it by yourself. To get these reports you can go under the events. And find the view search results event. After you click on it, you will get all the details regarding this event and if you scroll to the bottom you also see search terms. The last thing in this section are events. You can find them under engagement and then click on events. Since everything in GA4 is now an event, we will see a lot more events here, not just the ones you created. In UA events had multiple levels like category, action and label. In GA4 there is only an event name and whatever parameters you attach to it. So you could keep the structure from UA or change it completely, or even add multiple parameters depending on the events and so on. But this is a totally different topic. Now the last section I want to talk about are conversions. They have also been changed quite a lot and the most important thing, they have been unified and simplified. Basically what was called goals in UA is now called conversions. So you won't have separate conversions for goals and ecommerce, but instead we will find them all under engagement and then conversions. There are some events that are automatically marked as conversion. But you can mark any event as conversion if you wish. Simply by clicking on each event you will also get a detailed report. If you wish to create a funnel for your conversion, you can do so under the explorer. This time we would select funnel exploration. Then you simply define all your steps. And you will get a custom panel overview. This concludes this top level report comparison between UA and GA4. As you can see, you can find almost everything from UA in GA4, but most importantly you can create many more advanced reports more relevant to your specific business needs. 14. The Wrap up: Congratulations, you made it to the end of this course. I hope you now feel fully comfortable migrating to Google Analytics 4, If you have any comments or suggestions on how I can further improve this course, please let me know. I'd love to hear your feedback, especially if anything was missing or was unclear. This way I can improve the course for you and everybody else. Like with any product, it can only get better with user feedback. An interaction. Also, if you found this course helpful, feel free to rate it and leave a review. It would mean a lot to me. I'm also available for any additional questions if you have them. Just find me on LinkedIn at Ziga Berce or better yet, join our private success community where you will find heaps of knowledge waiting for you. Last but not least, if you know someone that needs help with GA4 migration. Please share this course with them. Thank you again for attending and good luck.