Google Analytics 4 in your online store: what to check before 1 July 2023

From 1 July 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new data. Want to keep tracking your sales? Your online store needs Google Analytics 4, with e-commerce events that are set up properly. Google lists the dates on its help page about the Universal Analytics sunset. Below is a checklist for stores on WordPress/WooCommerce or PrestaShop. The work takes a few hours, and you can finish it before the end of June.

The end of Universal Analytics: what exactly stops working in your store?

After 1 July 2023, Universal Analytics no longer collects new hits. The sales reports in the old property simply stop on that day. Google will also shut down UA audience lists, and that can hurt your remarketing campaigns in Google Ads. Attribution projects in Attribution (beta) will go away too. What does this mean in practice? From July on, you can only compare year over year using GA4 data. That’s why every week your new property collects data before the deadline counts.

Does your store already have a GA4 property, and is it collecting data?

Start in the Analytics panel. Check whether a GA4 property exists at all and whether the Realtime report shows traffic from your store. Since March 2023, Google has been creating GA4 properties automatically for accounts that didn’t migrate and didn’t opt out. That sounds handy, but such a property runs on your existing tags, and e-commerce usually just doesn’t work in it. You can check this in a few steps:

1. Open Admin and launch the GA4 Setup Assistant.
2. Go to your website data stream and copy the measurement ID that starts with G-.
3. Look at the page source and make sure the Google tag isn’t there twice (the classic case: the theme, a plugin and Google Tag Manager all at once). A duplicate tag doubles your pageviews and transactions.

GA4 e-commerce events: what has to reach your sales reports

GA4 counts sales from events only. Nothing else. So your store has to send the whole purchase path, from viewing a product to buying it. An event is a single customer action recorded by the tag. Parameters are the details attached to that action: the transaction ID, value, currency and list of products. The key events look like this:

1. view_item: the customer views a product page.
2. add_to_cart: a product goes into the cart.
3. begin_checkout: the customer starts placing an order.
4. add_payment_info: the customer picks a payment method.
5. purchase: the order has been placed.

How do you check it? Turn on DebugView, place a test order and watch whether each event arrives with all its parameters. Finally, compare the amount in purchase with the value of the same order in your store panel. It should match to the cent.

GA4 in WooCommerce and PrestaShop: plugin, module or Google Tag Manager?

In a small store, the simplest route is a WooCommerce plugin or a PrestaShop module that supports e-commerce events. Google Tag Manager only makes sense when your store already runs several marketing tags anyway. Sticking with your current plugin? Fine, but check three things: whether it accepts a G- ID, whether it sends purchase only after the order is placed (and not, say, when someone opens the checkout), and whether anyone keeps it updated for current versions of WooCommerce or PrestaShop. If its author has abandoned it, you’ll find plugins and modules with updates and support at K4.pl. You can also order a plugin there for an unusual purchase process.

And then there’s the consent banner. Your analytics tag has to respect it. Privacy rules require user consent for non-essential cookies, so it’s best to go over the details with a lawyer or with the person in charge of GDPR at your company.

GA4 settings worth changing right after setup

Will your store data be of any use a few months from now? That depends on a handful of settings in the panel. In my view, it’s best to change them as soon as the tag is connected:

• extend data retention in the property settings to the longest available period,
• mark the purchase event as a conversion,
• exclude internal traffic, meaning visits from your company’s IP addresses,
• add payment gateways to the list of unwanted referrals so they don’t take over the source of your transactions,
• link the property to Google Ads and Search Console.

Oh, and one more thing. If you use audience lists in UA for remarketing, recreate them in GA4 right now. New lists fill up slowly.

How do you keep your historical Universal Analytics data?

Nobody will do this for you. You have to download or export your UA data yourself, because Google says it will be deleted permanently, with no way to recover it. For a store, the most useful data is monthly revenue and number of transactions, traffic sources, best-selling products and conversion rate. The easiest way is to export reports to a Google Sheet or a CSV file. Got a lot of reports? Then the API helps, and in Analytics 360 properties you can export to BigQuery. Take data from full years. Without it, you can’t compare seasons.

Google Analytics 4 in your online store: a plan for the last days of June

There’s little time left to set up Google Analytics 4 in your online store, so here’s the order: check the GA4 property, configure e-commerce events, place a test order, fix the settings, export your UA data. Make sure you do the test purchase before 1 July 2023 and compare its value in GA4 with your store panel. Does it match? Then from July you have data to work with.

Frequently asked questions