How to migrate from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (server-side) with Relay42

Richard Jonkhof
Strategy Consultant and Customer Success Manager

You might have already seen the announcement by Google on the sunsetting of Universal Analytics (UA) and the necessary migration to Google Analytics 4 (GA 4).  

A lot of websites currently still run their analytics in the UA environment, mostly collected on the client-side (aka via the browser). Using Relay42 as the central point to feed data into Google Analytics offers several advantages, even more so for GA4. In this article, we will shortly explain why that is and how to set this up.  
 

Benefits of migrating to Google Analytics 4 server-side

• Future-proof setup  
  Migration from Universal Analytics to GA4 can be a complex process. It does, however, offer you an opportunity to cease the momentum of this migration to transition to a future-proof setup of your GA4 environment. With ITP and other privacy measures in browsers, client-side setups are already limited and expected to be even more impacted in the future.  
   
• No double work  
  Switching now to a server-side configuration reduces work compared to first moving to a tag manager-based setup of GA4 and then migrating to CDP based server-side configuration in the future.  

 
How to migrate to Google analytics 4 

As announced during our customer event, Relay42’s product vision is very much focused on creating a stable future-proof data foundation, that allows you to transition completely to server-side data collection and distribution. This means that your Universal Analytics set-up can be migrated towards a GA4 server-side setup leveraging our event connectors.  

Before starting with a full-blown migration bringing all your UA data to GA4, we strongly advise creating a transition plan first. Our consultants are happy to support you in such a transition plan and the roll-out of this plan. With the migration of UA towards GA4 (server-side) using Relay42 we see the following steps to take:  

1. Define a GA4 tracking plan – what events and parameters do you want to collect in GA4  
2. Gap analysis & tracking plan – identify what events and parameters are already collected and what is not yet collected  
3. Implement missing tracking – based on the gap analysis start collecting the missing engagements and parameters in Relay42  
4. Send the engagements and parameters to GA4 using an event level connector  

Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager, consultant, or our support team (support@relay42.com) for more details.