Readers managing Google Analytics accounts (that’s everyone, right?) might have had some slightly confusing messages from Google over the past few weeks about migrating to the new Google Analytics 4 (‘GA4’).
Most organised folk will have long ago created a parallel GA4 setup to record their website traffic alongside the retiring ‘Universal Analytics’ (‘UA’) system. The approach most generally agreed to be the smartest was for us to set this up from scratch and re-create what we had in the old system, using it as an opportunity to get rid of any junk we’d collected over the years.
Now, for those of us who did this, Google doesn’t appear to have been clever enough to identify what we’d done. As a result, it’s been popping up messages in our new GA4 property, asking if we want to connect it to an old UA one. The answer, for those of us who’ve been doing things intentionally, should be no. Anyone selecting ‘yes’ gets sent to a ‘Setup Assistant’ which will copy settings across.
There’s more. Anyone with a UA property will have been getting messages, including through email, saying that a connected GA4 property will automatically be created for us unless we tell Google otherwise. This is getting really irritating now.
The fix for this is to go to every old UA property (via ‘Admin’ and the ‘Property’ column), select ‘GA4 setup assistant’ and disable the ‘Automatically setup a basic Google Analytics 4 property’ slider.
The excellent Julius Fedorovicius has a short video going through all of this here.