Google Analytics change from UA to GA4

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What's happening?

On 1 July 2023, Google Universal Analytics (UA) will stop collecting data. Google has advised six months of historical data will be preserved within a customer's GA account. However, new data will only flow into Google Analytics 4 (GA4) properties. 

What impact will this have?

The withdrawal of UA will impact the generation of site statistics at the platform level and the calculation for how sites are charged. This article provides details about how these changes will affect the management of your Mosaic site.

Impact on Oxford Mosaic platform tracker

  • Our Google Analytics Platform tracker, which uses UA, will stop working on 1 July.   

  • Although UA is being replaced by GA4, resource constraints mean we can't justify developing a replacement site statistics report for the current version of Mosaic.  

  • A separate change, which has impacted our decision not to use GA4, is the mechanism we currently use to collect traffic data is being deprecated. As a consequence, it will no longer be possible for Mosaic to collect site traffic data at the platform level after 1 July. 

  • The Site Settings > Site Statistics page will be removed at the end of June and a notification message is being displayed to alert Site Owners to this change.

Impact on charging metrics

  • The charging level applicable to a Mosaic site has until now been determined by three principal criteria: quarterly page visits; total disk space; and total number of pages. From 1 August 2023, charging will be based on total disk space and total number of pages only. Details about charging can be found on Pricing | Oxford Mosaic.

  • A very small number of sites may go into a lower charging tier as a result of this change; billing will be adjusted accordingly.

  • The thresholds for charging related to storage and page numbers remain unchanged.

What this means for your site

If you have added your own GA tracker to your site, you will need to switch to a GA4 property in your GA account.  When switching to use GA4, you can still access old statistics in your UA property but new data will be collected and be viewable in the GA4 profile.

Further information is available from Google support. 

Mosaic documentation

Google Analytics is external to the Mosaic platform. Details of how to use GA on your Mosaic site are provided in the documentation for Google Analytics | Oxford Mosaic.