How To Export Your Google Analytics Universal Data Before It’s Completely Gone.

Digital Marketing / July 18, 2023

It’s done. 

After years of talking about it, Google Analytics 4 finally replaced Universal Analytics on July 1st, 2023. 

So, what happens with your Universal Analytics data from now on? Your Google Universal Analytics property and all its data will be deleted by Google on July 1st, 2024. 

Sadly, you’ve probably accumulated a lot of valuable data and insights in Universal Analytics over the years. If you lose access to this data, your business and marketing efforts may be negatively affected:

1. Loosing all this data will impact your ability to look back on past performance, understand seasonal variations, make predictions based on historical data and identify trends and patterns. 
2. Also, some industries and jurisdictions have legal or regulatory requirements to store certain types of data for a fixed period of time. Without this data, it’ll be impossible for your business to fulfill these obligations and show compliance when being audited.

But, fear not… there are ways to export and store your Google Analytics Universal data. 

In this article, we’ll be sharing a few solutions so your business can still see and use your Universal Analytics data for years to come. 

Exporting your Google Analytics Universal Data

Our web analytics experts highly recommend exporting your Google Analytics Universal data as soon as you can. Often businesses wait until the last minute, leading to unexpected issues and delayed exports, and no one wants to deal with that. 

Use the Google Analytics Reporting API

Google’s reporting API lets you export your Google Analytics data to cloud storage, which is a great first step. We would recommend asking a web developer for help to complete this step since setting up API calls and handling this incredible amount of data requires specific technical skills. 

Thanks to this API, your data won’t be lost for good, it’ll be safely stored in your preferred storage solution. However, due to the sheer volume of data available in Google Analytics, it won’t be usable just yet. Making sense of rows of data in their raw form can be quite challenging.

One solution is to connect your data source in a business intelligence tool like Looker Studio (formely Google Data Studio).

Google Looker Studio is a very popular data visualization tool which will help you view and analyze your data in a very user-friendly way. 

There are templates available in Looker Studio but we recommend building your own personalized dashboard where you can set the most important metrics and dimensions for your business. You’ll also be able to connect other data sources, which will help centralize business intelligence. 

Don’t be scared to ask for help

Every business using Google Analytics should go through the steps of exporting their Universal Analytics data before 2024. We understand that this process can be overwhelming for brands without access to Web developers or data analyst. 

Bloom can support you through this process and ensure you can easily access and analyze your historical data. Contact us here for more information.