If you're using Google Analytics to track your website's performance and you’ve logged in recently, you will have seen this message pop up:
While it may be tempting to let Google handle the GA4 migration process for your website, it is important to consider the risks and drawbacks of an automatic migration.
Risks of automatic migration
Without going into too much detail, the biggest drawback of ‘letting Google do it for you’ is that Google does not have an understanding of your individual websites’ unique configurations and customisation.
Most HMC clients have custom website goals set up – such as tracking contact form submissions, phone call tracking, PDF downloads - which will all be lost if you auto-migrate. This means you won’t be able to attribute goal conversions by traffic channel and can’t optimise your paid digital PR or advertisement campaigns accordingly.
For e-commerce businesses it is even less desirable to allow Google to auto-migrate you to GA4. For clients who have let this happen, we have found massive discrepancies of reported revenue and transactions in GA4 when not manually upgraded.
GA4 benefits
As soon as you migrate to GA4, you’ll gain a lot of benefits and improvements. Clients who have already migrated value, in particular, the more in-depth reporting features which focus more on the user engagement and journey.
HMC will help make migration easy
If you want to take control of your website’s GA4 migration and need help, contact Hariet at HMC today. She’ll work together with you to make sure it’s easy and painless!