Migrating Universal Analytics (UA) Over to Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
It looks like Google has finally released a "migration" wizard to migrate from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. Does this mean we'll finally get to import our historical data from Universal Analytics into GA4?
Ever since the release of Google Analytics 4 webmasters far and wide were complaining, saying how ridiculous it is that you can't carry over your historical Universal Analytics data to GA4 and I agree, it felt like a botched product launch.
So is Google finally giving us the ability to transfer over historical data from UA to GA4 with this new migration wizard?
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It looks like Google has finally released a "migration" wizard to migrate from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. Does this mean we'll finally get to import our historical data from Universal Analytics into GA4?
Ever since the release of Google Analytics 4 webmasters far and wide were complaining, saying how ridiculous it is that you can't carry over your historical Universal Analytics data to GA4 and I agree, it felt like a botched product launch.
So is Google finally giving us the ability to transfer over historical data from UA to GA4 with this new migration wizard?
From this screen, it's still not clear if your historical data in UA will be transferred to the new GA4 property. They simply say that they'll copy your basic UA configuration details to GA4, which who knows exactly what that means.
After going through this migration wizard for my own website, I still wasn't able to see my historical data from Universal Analytics. I also didn't see that it migrated over any conversion tracking set up I had in UA.
I still had to add a GA4 Config tag in Google Tag Manager for it to track pageviews, so it would seem this migration wizard is just a slightly easier way to create the actual GA4 property but nothing more.
Still we're left wanting a way to transfer our historical UA data over to GA4. The only way I've seen to do that is using a 3rd party tool called Fathom.