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Google Analytics is deleting all of your historical data

news  Paul Jarvis · Apr 3, 2024

A few days ago, Google announced it would turn off all Universal Analytics services on July 1, 2024.

That means on July 1, you won’t be able to use or even see your UA data in Google Analytics, and worse, you won’t be able to export it.

Luckily, there’s still time to save your Google Analytics UA data by importing it into Fathom Analytics.

The best part? We have forever data retention. That means you can view your UA data on your Fathom Analytics dashboard forever.

What should marketers do?

Well, if you use Universal Analytics, you’ve got to migrate to GA4 (and lose your UA data), export your UA data into a CSV file, or simply move to Fathom Analytics and run our straightforward GA importer.

Why did Google kill off Universal Analytics?

Google’s track record for killing off popular software products is well documented. Many of their products, especially those they offer for “free,” are killed off, and their data is deleted forever.

With Fathom, our only product is analytics (meaning we wouldn’t kill it off). Since we charge a fair price to use our product, we’re sustainable enough to keep our service running indefinitely.

GA4 has not been well received

There’s been a massive backlash among marketers and small business owners against being forced to use GA4. They say it’s too complicated, confusing, and barely usable.

Even Google's search engine showcases how badly received GA4 has been.

Obviously, we’re heavily biased in our view that Fathom is a better option than GA4. However, we can also see the proof in the sheer number of new customers we’ve acquired who’ve tried GA4 and decided it wasn’t for them. People are deleting their Google Analytics accounts in droves. The week UA stopped collecting new pageviews (last year) was easily one of the best new customer acquisition weeks we’ve ever seen. So it’s not just us who feel that GA4 isn’t working, spending months to learn; it’s the thousands of folks (or more) who’ve left Google for other analytics software.

There’s another (better way)

Website analytics should be simple and respect people’s digital privacy. That’s why we created Fathom, the best Google Analytics alternative.

Why Fathom, you might ask? Well, here are just a few points:

  • We have forever data retention, meaning we’ll never delete your data.
  • We’re privacy-focused and GDPR-compliant. No cookie banners are required!
  • Signing up and adding our embed code to any site takes less than a few minutes.
  • Our real-time analytics blocks bots, scrapers and spam traffic—showing you only actual human visits.
  • We help you see ecommerce data, track events like newsletter sign-ups, and much more
  • Receive email reports with your weekly or monthly traffic updates.
  • We integrate easily with WordPress, Webflow, Vue.js, and much more.

You can start a free 30-day trial today and start importing all of your UA (and GA4) data before you even start paying for your account. So, if you’re frustrated that UA has stopped working and your UA data is being deleted soon, give Fathom a try now before it’s too late to save your UA data.

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Paul Jarvis

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Paul Jarvis, author + designer

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