Universal Analytics (UA) was the version of Google Analytics most websites used for around a decade before Google replaced it with GA4. If you are looking for your old reports, they are gone: standard UA properties stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, and Google removed access to the remaining data during 2024.
How Universal Analytics worked
UA was built around sessions and pageviews. Each visit was a session, each page loaded was a hit, and other actions were recorded as events with a category, action and label. Property IDs began “UA-”, and data was organised into views, each of which could filter traffic differently. Success was measured through goals, up to 20 per view, set up as destination pages, durations or events.
Several familiar metrics came from UA. Bounce rate meant the share of single-page sessions with no recorded interaction. Average session duration was worked out from the time between hits, so the last page of every visit counted as zero seconds. “Users” meant total users. Reports on busy properties were often sampled.
Its successor, Google Analytics 4, records everything as events, uses engagement rather than bounces as its main quality signal, replaces goals with key events and has no views. GA4 does show a bounce rate, but it is simply the opposite of engagement rate and means something different from UA’s.
Why it matters
Most UK businesses run into UA today in three ways.
The first is year-on-year comparison. Figures from before mid-2023 came from a different tool with different definitions, so a fall in users or a change in bounce rate across the switch often reflects measurement, not performance. Many sites also added a compliant cookie banner around the same time, which further reduced what analytics could see.
The second is lost history. Once Google deleted the data, it could not be recovered. Some businesses kept copies in spreadsheets or Looker Studio extracts, and Analytics 360 customers could export to BigQuery; everyone else starts their history from the day GA4 was installed.
The third is leftover code. Old UA tags, such as analytics.js or gtag snippets carrying a UA- ID, still sit on many sites sending data to nowhere. They add weight to every page and may still set cookies, which still need consent under PECR.
Common mistakes
- Putting GA4 and UA figures side by side in a board report without explaining the change of tool.
- Assuming GA4 imported UA history. It never did.
- Leaving UA tags or old analytics plugins running after the switch.
- Looking for views, goals or the old bounce rate in GA4 and concluding the data is missing.
How to act on it
Search your site’s code, your Google Tag Manager container and any analytics plugins for “UA-” IDs and analytics.js, and remove them. If you kept exported UA data, store it with a short note explaining how its metrics were defined, so anyone comparing it later does so carefully. If a previous agency or developer kept an archive of exported UA reports, ask for a copy now rather than when you next need it.
For trend reporting, treat July 2023 as a break in the series and add an annotation to your dashboards. Build year-on-year comparisons from GA4 data only, alongside your own sales or enquiry records, which never changed definition. Setting up reporting that survives tool changes like this is part of the digital marketing strategy work I do.