GA4 migration: July 2023 is closer than your dev queue

Google announced in March that Universal Analytics will stop processing new hits on 1 July 2023. Eight months later, most of the accounts we audit still have no GA4 property collecting anything. The GA4 migration deadline is not the problem. The problem is that every month you wait is a month of missing year on year comparison you can never recover, because GA4 does not backfill history.

Start the GA4 migration today, even if the rest waits

Create the GA4 property and get the base tag firing. It takes an afternoon. From that moment you are banking data in parallel with Universal Analytics, so that when the switch happens you already have a year of comparable numbers. Teams that set this up in early 2022 will spend next summer analyzing trends. Teams that leave it to June will spend next summer explaining why the chart starts in the middle.

Then plan for the model change, not just the tag

GA4 is not a redesign of Universal Analytics. It is a different measurement model. Sessions and pageviews give way to events and parameters, bounce rate is gone in favor of engaged sessions, and the reporting interface assumes you will build explorations rather than read canned reports. Anyone who migrates the tag but not the thinking ends up with a tool nobody in the business trusts.

Our migration checklist runs in this order. Map the ten business questions the reports actually need to answer. Define the events and parameters that answer them, using recommended event names wherever they exist. Configure conversions, audiences and internal traffic filters. Link Google Ads and Search Console. Rebuild the essential reports as explorations. Then run both properties side by side for at least three months and reconcile the differences before you trust either one.

Expect the numbers to disagree

They will, and that is normal. Different session definitions, different attribution defaults and different handling of consent mean GA4 typically reports somewhat fewer sessions and differently distributed conversions. Explain that to stakeholders now, in a calm meeting, rather than in July when a dashboard suddenly moves.

Analytics migrations are unglamorous engineering with a hard date attached, which is exactly why they slip. If yours has been sitting in a backlog since March, our website and app development team does this work as a fixed scope project so the deadline stops being your problem.