Google Analytics is going away. Don't lose your data. Back it up now and get ready for GA 4.
Universal Analytics will stop recording new hits on 1st July 2023. After approximately 6 months it will stop working altogether.
We'll work with you to set you up a data warehouse and back-up your GA data so you'll have all of it forever. All the gritty details below. Price from £600.
Get in touchPricing
Our pricing for Google Analytics backup is a fixed cost typically between £600 & £1,000.
- Consultation
- Set-up of data warehouse (or integration into existing).
- Loading of data
- Access to query platform
- Access to our training resources
FAQ
- How does the process for this work?
- Are there any benefits to a data warehouse aside from backing up your data?
- Can you tie together GA4 and UA?
- How do you work with a data warehouse?
- How far back can I back-up?
- Are there restrictions on what you can backup?
- What data warehouses do you support?
- What if I want to migrate away from Google Analytics completely?
How does the process for this work?
1. At the start we'll run a short consulting session. We'll work out your data requirements and talk you through what is possible. Analytics is complicated and we'll walk you through it.
2. We'll get you set-up with a data warehouse (if you haven't got one).
3. We'll back-up all your data into it. Your new UA data will be downloaded and stored every day until UA sunsets.
4. Finally we'll set you up with our query platform so you get the benefits of the data warehouse as well as just using it for backup (details below)!
Are there any benefits to a data warehouse aside from backing up your data?
Yes! We've got plenty of customers who have been storing GA data before they needed to backup. Primarily for the following reasons:
- Avoiding sampling: By downloading the data day by day, we let you build custom reports without sampling.
- Speed: Working with large amounts of data is notably faster in a data warehouse than in the GA interface.
- Joining other data sources: Having all your data in a warehouse makes it easier to join with other data types. We focus on the SEO data sources, so typically that's also Search Console, crawl data, logs etc.
- Fixing and changing data: Once data is exported it is possible to change it, interpolate missing data, remove PII etc. You can also categorise retroactively.
Can you tie together GA4 and UA?
The data models aren't identical so you won't be able to get perfect session to session numbers.
But we will be able to help you tie together the data sources.
We are also building reporting templates to offer to people, which should be available by the end of April at latest, but hopefully sooner.
How do you work with a data warehouse?
When any data is in a data warehouse, you need to use SQL to work with it.
Piped Out provides a query builder with pre-built queries that just allows you to fill in a form to generate what you need. (Handy gif below shows basic SEO metrics (i.e. landing pages report).)
You can use this for ad-hoc analysis, or to plug straight into a reporting tool like Data Studio, Tableau etc.
How far back can I back-up?
As far back as you've got. However keep in mind that GA has a default retention period of 26 months, so unless you've changed it any data before that becomes unuseable.
Are there restrictions on what you can backup?
Yes. All the back-ups from GA make use of the API and this gives some limitations, doesn't matter if you're using a third part tool or us. Everyone will bump into these limitations.
The primary one is each report is limited to 7 dimensions and 10 metrics. This means you can't get literally everything at once (Unless you've already done some custom work to store a unique session level ID.).
Instead you have to broadly think about it in terms of reports you want to generate, we can help you work through this.
What data warehouses do you support?
We primarily work with BigQuery at the moment. We do work with other data warehouses, there additional costs for working with them.
Specifically for the scenario where you have been using UA and you're going to move to GA 4, we'd highly recommend using BigQuery because GA 4 has a built in BigQuery export.
By having both of these in the same place, it sets it up for tying the two sources together.
What if I want to migrate away from Google Analytics completely?
If you just want an analytics platform with your GA data, then this probably isn't the best option.
Pretty much every other small analytics provider at this point will be pushing out a GA import feature as fast as possible (maybe not Adobe for example, but certainly people like Fathom, Matomo already has one etc.).
Wait until the platform of your choice has and they'll almost certainly let you import as part of their sign-up process.
But if in the long term you want to be able to tie together all your different sources more easily then putting it all into a data warehouse is a great idea and we can help!