analytics

This week marks a turning point in web analytics, a sort of un-anniversary: one year from now, Google will retire Universal Analytics, which for years now has been synonymous with “Google Analytics” (and for a lot of folks, let’s be honest, with web analytics in general). It’s being replaced with a shiny, new, barely-out-of-beta Google Analytics 4. A year might seem a long way away, but if you want year-over-year data available in GA4 when you start using it primarily, you need to have it set up and collecting data now. Literally, ASAP. Preferably yesterday. A ton has been written about the nitty-gritty details by people who specialize in web analytics (check out this GA4 FAQ from Krista Seiden for a good rundown on what’s changing), and I’m not going to attempt to replicate them here. What I am going to do is break down, in the simplest possible terms, what this means for the typical small-to-medium nonprofit digital team. Specifically, for those of you who need to figure this out and don’t have an entire team of analytics folks and web developers or a big agency on retainer to take care of it. Here we go. What is Google Read More