GA4 Migration Without Losing the Plot
Full Universal Analytics → GA4 migration within six-month vendor deadline; zero rupture to marketing and commercial visibility.
In brief
Situation. Google announced the deprecation of Universal Analytics and the move to GA4. Every business that ran its marketing on Google Analytics, which is essentially every consumer business, had a six-month window to migrate.
Complication. Migrating analytics is not like changing a coffee supplier. It means rebuilding dashboards, redefining metrics, and reassessing the business value of every KPI the company had been using for years. Get it wrong and the marketing and commercial teams lose their visibility on revenue. Get it slow and the deadline passes.
Resolution. I oversaw the full migration within the six-month window, with execution led by the Head of BI and Analytics reporting to me. Stakeholders (Marketing, Global Commercial) were involved continuously to reassess the business value of each metric before re-implementing it. Dashboards, algorithms, and reports were all transitioned without rupture.
Impact. Critical analytics assets preserved. Insights to business users continued uninterrupted. The company’s analytical capability survived a vendor-imposed platform change that broke a lot of other companies’ reporting for months.
The longer story
Forced migrations have one underrated virtue: they make you throw things out.
Most companies have a graveyard of dashboards built three CMOs ago, watched by no-one, but still consuming engineering attention because nobody dared switch them off. A vendor-imposed migration is a free pass to do the audit.
You cannot migrate everything in six months, so you migrate what matters. By the time we finished, we had not just a GA4 implementation, we had a leaner, more deliberate set of metrics that the business actually used. Half the dashboards never came back. Nobody noticed.
The lesson is one I now apply on purpose, even when nobody is forcing me: every two years, schedule a “forced migration” on yourself. Pretend the tool is going away. Decide what you would rebuild. Quietly retire the rest. Organisations that do this stay light. Organisations that do not end up paying engineers to maintain dashboards last looked at in 2019.