#1 Ignore your initial instinct to leave it for later. Then, scramble for last-second lever-yanking…

• You’ve also heard that one friend describe his bumpy ride…“Switching to GA4 feels like trying to change the wheels on a bike while riding it downhill”
• But instead of feeling annoyed, instead of getting stuck, you’re here looking for…

The Simplest Way to Safeguard Your Valuable Universal Analytics (UA) Data

#2 Roll up your sleeves and go DIY Manual Mode. Here’s how this looks:

Unless you’ve got hours to kill, there are two obvious drawbacks to attempting this:

• It’s prone to human errors – because it’s a mind-numbing task: Scouring each analytics property, flawlessly clicking through every report view.
• Unless you’ve got a brand new site that’s only a few months old, storing your data in Google Sheets or CSV is a bad idea.
  
  Here’s why: These tools often hit a snag with high data volumes.
  
  So, a few weeks later, when you need your data the most... it won't load because there's too much.

#3 Instead, I recommend housing your data in either BigQuery or Snowflake. Both are awesome.

They open up a WORLD of possibilities for extracting insights from your data.

To keep this guide simple, we focus on BigQuery, since it's an appropriate solution for most businesses. But the process is almost identical for Snowflake.

With that said, here goes...

10-Steps to Get Your Data Out of Universal Analytics

1. Sign up for a Google Cloud (GCP) account and receive $300 free credits
2. Create a GCP project
3. Attach a billing account to the GCP project
4. Create a GCP service account for using with Airbyte
5. Create a storage bucket in GCP for assisting in the data transfer process
6. Enable BigQuery in GCP (it's not enabled by default)
7. Sign-up for a 14-day trial of Airbyte and receive 400 free credits (worth $1000), so you can test-drive Airbyte properly… and so you can transfer your Universal Analytics data!
8. Add BigQuery as a destination in Airbyte. Alternatively, you can send your data to a number of other popular destinations including Snowflake, Redshift, Google Sheets, CSV file, S3 bucket, Firestore, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres and more
9. Choose Universal Analytics as a data source
10. Connect the Universal Analytics source to the BigQuery destination and hit the "sync" button. Depending on the amount of data, it could take between a few minutes to a few hours.

Hope you found this useful!

If you want more guidance (or you just want us to do it for you), you can book a call below.

You'll talk with a data person in plain English, not a sales rep. This means you'll get real answers instead of a fake discovery call.

Or you can grab a course with 12 straight-to-the-point video lessons, with not a single word wasted...

P.S. I know, it’s odd to be introducing myself in the ‘p.s.’ but here goes.

Hi, I’m Wynne Pirini and the first thing you ought to know about me is this: 

I’m not a twitter celebrity. 

Heck, I got zero time to play a guru on Youtube because, over the past 6 years I’ve been that mad scientist behind the scenes (at Measurebit.com) helping brands and media buyers like Kelvin, Dorothy, John and countless others untangle one hairy problem…

…pressing the breaks on wasted ad spend instead of watching the machine (Google or Facebook or whatever) push more budget towards subpar campaigns. 

How? 

By ensuring only clean data gets fed back to performance marketing campaigns – without the need to upgrade your tech skills, stitching together APIs, manipulating third-party tags or even getting a grip on Google Tag Manager’s  data layer for each project. 

Putting a brand’s tracking stack under the microscope (scrutinizing gaps with our ‘deep dive audit’) would normally cost $5,000, and we have to get on a 15-minute call to see if your project is a good fit.

Now, because we’re ticking down to when Google pulls the plug on your UA data, I’ve decided to offer help.

If you want more guidance (or you just want us to do it for you), you can book a call below.

You'll talk with a data person in plain English, not a sales rep. This means you'll get real answers instead of a fake discovery call.

Or get the next best thing at a steal of a price:

Get started with “From Universal Analytics to Data Warehouse in Under 30-minutes” for only $50 (normally $99)   

Once you see the step-by-step, ‘watch over my shoulder’ video lessons you will understand why media buyers and brands like Kelvin, Dorothy and John are getting a leg up against their competitors.

Without accurate tracking, It’s impossible to tell which campaigns are crushing it or crashing.

Horror stories… 

…brands trapped by broken dashboards in almost every account we audit at measurebit.com

Everything looks green. Another profitable day. Yet the moment they scale paid media, cashflow goes negative. The culprit? 

“Phantom conversion events” that misleading platforms like (or Facebook or whatever) by showing a green flag event when in reality no sale came through. Detecting and fixing these is a tale for another post.

Or get started with “From Universal Analytics to Data Warehouse in Under 30-minutes” for only $50 (normally $99)