Google has announced that Universal Analytics (UA) will be sunsetted on July 1st, 2023 with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) becoming the new standard. In preparation for this shift, we are making changes to our website traffic reports.

What are website traffic reports?

At Watchful, website traffic reports are used to monitor visits to your websites. You can view these traffic reports in two ways. The first is from the sites dashboard and the second is from the client reports. And both of these reports rely on UA.

Here is what each report looks like at this time. Note that we have selected to display the traffic data from the previous month.

What is changing?

Google Analytics 4 is not a drop-in replacement for Universal Analytics. Not only will some of the metrics be changing, how data is processed and retrieved is also very different.

For these and other reasons, last year we urged caution when migrating to GA4. However, we must now prepare for the upcoming sunsetting of UA.

As a result, we have had to make some changes to how traffic data from prior months is displayed.

Website traffic in the sites dashboard

Once the changes are launched, the sites dashboard will no longer display the current and prior traffic data at the same time. One or the other will be shown instead as you can see in the animation below.

Note that the statistics on the left will continue to list data from both the current and previous months.

Website traffic in client reports

In client reports, traffic data from both the current and previous months will continue to be displayed at the same time. But as you can see below, they will be displayed in one color-coded scatter plot and not overlapped.

One advantage of this layout is that the dates of the data being displayed are perfectly clear as the X-axis is now linear.

When will these changes take effect

We plan to launch these changes with immediate effect. This will help us get closer to the launch of our Google Analytics 4 integration later this summer.