Upgrading to Google Universal Analytics

Question

I have been searching around to find out anything that needs to be taken into consideration when upgrading to Universal Analytics.

I found this post:

Google Analytics - Upgrading to Async Code

He explains that if you are not doing anything advanced you should be ok. We have lots of event tracking in place that we would like to keep the same. We also have some Custom Variables I could do without and/or deal with in Custom Dimensions.

Other than that we have a fairly basic setup.

We do have a "keep alive" event in place also that helps determine an accurate time on site.

Another really important question has everything to do with being able to transistion from Classic analytics to Universal. Is this possible? I found an article that said it wasn't but that article was a couple months old and not sure if its still true.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

I recently inherited a project loaded with Google Analytics and I had never worked with them before. The code migration to Universal Analytics was straightforward with the exception of moving from Custom Vars to Dimensions. Google's documentation does little to highlight this.

After some digging around I found a couple of things that I think may help others that are migrating:

1) Set up or edit custom dimensions & metrics

Note that when you set up the Dimensions you are provided with code snippets that you can copy & paste into your project.

2) How to use the code to send custom dimensions & metrics

This docmentation will help you understand the provided code snippets and learn how to better work with them.

I hope this info spares others some of the pain that I experienced going through this.

Answer 2

Universal Analytics is Google's newest tracking code. It is currently in beta phase, so you may want to hold off on it, depending on your resources... In principle it works more or less the same way as the async code. Here are the major points about it:

• The syntax is different. All config/tracking is done by making a call to ga()
• Some of the "config" arguments for things have been moved to the GA interface. For example, names and scope for custom variables are no longer passed as arguments on-page. They are now done within the GA interface. Actually to be more accurate, custom variables no longer exist. Google now has custom dimensions and metrics as a replacement. Custom dimensions are the closest translation to custom variables (they are pretty much the same in principle). Custom metrics are some kind of mix between dimensions and events.
• Google currently does NOT offer a way to upgrade your profile(s)/account(s) to Universal Analytics style. In order to use Universal Analytics, you have to create a new account or profile. If you want to try Universal Analytics out, Google currently recommends implementing it along side the traditional or async version you already have implemented.
• Google has not currently officially stated when or if they will provide a means to migrate existing profiles, though I personally think they eventually will, since preserving historical data and reducing time and costs associated with migrating is a huge concern to everybody.

Answer 3

In addition to @Crayon-Violent's answer, be aware that the current Core Reporting API (v3) doesn't support retrieving custom dimension/metric data.

Answer 4

I've created a plugin like jQuery Migrate to backward compatibilty of eventTracking and other features. Allow developers to migrate old methods _gaq.push() to ga() object.

https://github.com/empiricompany/universal-analytics-migrate

Answer 5

This month Google anounced that classical analytics properties can be upgraded to Universal without any data loss.

Universal Analytics is a set of technological innovations that improve the way data is collected and processed in Google Analytics. The Universal Analytics Upgrade is a process you can use to upgrade all of your classic Google Analytics properties into Universal Analytics properties without losing any data or changing your account settings. All Google Analytics properties will soon be required to use Universal Analytics. Any properties that don’t follow the upgrade process will be auto-transferred to Universal Analytics in the future.

You can upgrade your analytics property from analytics admin panel. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/

In case of upgrade problems you can refer to Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ua-upgrade