Export from Universal Analytics stops

Google Analytics is a free service that can be used by website operators to collect statistics from a website and display them in detail. This allows you to gain insight into, among other things, the visitor flows, traffic sources and page views of your website. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) only looks back 14 months. Older data is stored in the predecessor called Universal Analytics (UA) and can be retrieved in Google Analytics.

That is now coming to an end. Universal Analytics stops. As of July 1, 2023, Google will remove the data from Universal Analytics, so you will no longer be able to see data that is more than 14 months old. So it becomes impossible to see long-term trends over several years, unless you take measures and export the data and settings from Universal Analytics. Of course, this only applies if you have previously worked with UA and are now working with GA4.

What does Google do?

If you haven't created a GA4 property at all (you're not working with GA4 yet), Google has created a property for you based on your UA settings, unless you've opted out. Properties are websites or blogs that are linked to a unique tracking ID. An Analytics account can be linked to multiple properties.
If you do have a GA4 property (you deployed GA4 after October 14, 2020) and linked it to a UA property, all settings (e.g. goals, audiences, etc.) will be copied to your GA4 property unless you have unsubscribed.
After July 1, 2023 (for 360 UA properties, July 1, 2024) you will have access to the data in UA for a minimum of 6 months. However, this data is not included in GA4.

What you can do:

• export historical reports from UA,
• switch to GA4 as soon as possible to collect the necessary historical data in the new version,
• export the data in different formats using the Google Analytics Reporting API. 360 customers can also export data to BigQuery, a data visualization tool.

Google will provide more information about data export as the date approaches when Universal Analytics will no longer be available.

Google Ads

If you haven't linked your Universal Analytics property to your Google Ads account, your Google Ads account will not be affected. Otherwise, UA data will no longer be sent to Google Ads after July 1, 2023 (for Analytics 360 properties, this is July 1, 2024).
This can affect Google Ads campaigns in the following cases:

• if you bid on imported Universal Analytics targets or e-commerce transactions,
• if you use a Universal Analytics audience in your campaigns,
• when you import Universal Analytics site statistics.

What you can do then is migrate the Google Ads links from your UA property to your GA4 property. Then you need to import GA4 conversions (for bidding) and/or add GA4 audiences to a campaign or ad group (for remarketing).