When it comes to identifying areas of opportunity on our websites, we have to consider our customers. What do they expect from us? Many times, meeting expectations can be key to turning visitors into customers.

When it comes to eCommerce customer expectations, there are three areas we should focus our attention on in general: Transparency, ease of use, and value.

Transparency

When it comes to both online and offline storefronts, trust is important. If a customer can’t bring themselves to trust your company or products, they most likely won’t buy from you. In a brick-and-mortar store customers may wonder where or how your products or made, or ponder about your return policies and general customer service. If such questions can’t be answered by the documentation around your store nor your employees, customers may not trust the store enough to do business with you.

Be clear with your policies and processes

Similar to retail customers, online customers share the same concerns. Instead of looking for a poster by the register or an employee to talk to, they expect documentation on your site to ease their concerns. Your return policy, shipping methods, fees, and privacy measures should all be available for customers to see. This transparency will allow customers to understand what the process, benefits and potentials risks are when dealing with your company.

Make sure your products & services are detailed and accurate

Another aspect of transparency is your products. In a physical store front, customers can physically interact with products and ask questions as they go, but for eCommerce stores, customers have less opportunity to ask questions and in general have a shorter attention span. It is important that our product descriptions, images, and stock information are accurate and detailed enough to make our products or services tangible.

Offer a way to contact your company

Even the best sites may not be able to fully answer every question a potential customer may have. The next step for an interested but confused customer would be to contact your company. How can they reach you? It is important to have contact page that is up-to-date and offers multiple avenues of communication for customer service. If your company is quite large, it may not be reasonable to talk to all customers directly. In that case, a chat bot may help answer common questions and hand-off users to someone who can answer the rest.

Ease of use

Customer’s don’t want shopping to be a hassle. The more inconvenient it is to peruse your store, find what they are looking for, and pay for your product, the more likely it is that they will never buy from your business again. The same applies for our online shops: we need to make it as easy as possible to find what they want and buy it.

Optimize your navigation from start to finish

Since shopping online isn’t new, customers may have high expectations when it comes to navigating your online shop. Your website design should be intuitive to use, meaning that the placement of your buttons, call to actions (CTAs), links, and so forth should be placed where users would expect them to be. For example, the contact us button tends to be placed in the upper right-hand corner of your navigation. Users may look to that location out of habit, and if your contact us page is not there, it may leave them confused. The same applies to other aspects of your site: customers have pre-existing ideas of what they can do and will have to do to buy your products.

Optimizing your navigation is a whole site effort. Navigating your product selection, your cart page, and your checkout process are all important to ensuring that your customer has a good experience with your site.

Make sure your site feels fast

How fast your site feels to a customer can be a make it or break it moment. Customers expect your pages to load in a timely manner. If your pages take too long to load, they may just leave your site entirely. Tracking the speed of your site with metrics such as Google’s [] is important to making sure your site is performing well. Beyond load time, the process of going through your site through feel fast as well. How many pages or steps do users have to go through before they arrive at the checkout confirmation page? Keeping things short and sweet will help users feel like its quick and easy to shop at your store.

Consider multiple devices and payment options

When designing a website, we must consider that users may be visiting our site from different locations, and thus different devices.  Phones, tablets, desktops, and so forth can easily access your site, and users will expect your site experience to work on the device of their choice. Making sure that your online shop looks good, runs well, and is easy to use across devices is important.

Another aspect to consider is that users may have different preferences on how they purchase or receive their products. Having a variety of payment methods helps you ensure that you can accommodate multiple customers’ preferred method. The same applies to shipping. Having different shipping options can make buying your product an easy decision rather than a disappointment when a customer discovers that they can’t receive your product.

Value

For a customer, the value of your business comes from your ability to solve their pain points. How will your products and services help them? What makes your company stand out? Why should a customer choose your company over another? For many customers, the answers to these questions are expected to be readily available for them as they consider your company.

Explain why customers should do business with you

When a potential customer first arrives at your page, they want to know not only what your business is about, but why they should consider buying from you. Your “why” should be obvious and visible upon landing on your page. Whether it be a CTA in your above the fold content, or descriptions later down the page, customers don’t want to search too far for why your business is valuable.

Another aspect that customers may want to see is why your business is more valuable than other competitors. What makes your business stand out? Sharing what makes your products and services unique can help answer these questions swiftly rather than leaving customers to search for those answers on their own online.

Put customer reviews where visitors will see them

Customer reviews are key to illustrating your business value to customers in a way that is believable and relatable. While we can explain and praise our own value directly to customers on our own, hearing our value shared by real customers can make our business feel real and legitimate.

Want to learn more?

There are many ways that we can better understand what our customers truly want. Check out our blog for more insight on how to optimize your website for more customers. If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

When it comes to measuring the success of a website, conversion rates are a great metric to track. Not only do conversion rates give us an idea of how well our site is attracting user interaction, but it also gives us a number to target when it comes to future business goals. However, what is considered a good conversion rate?

What are conversion rates?

Conversions are actions we want users to take. Whether it be buying our products or subscribing to our email lists, conversions can be any user action that we consider valuable to our business. For example, conversions we may want to measure could be:

• User Sign ups for email, events, text message notifications, etc.
• Account creation.
• Social media interactions, such as follows, likes, shares, etc.
• Downloads of freebies and promotional materials.
• Product reviews or ratings.
• Views or clicks on specific pages.
• Products added to cart or schedule consultations.
• Purchases of your products and services.

Our conversion rate is the percentage of users who convert over the total number of user interactions. For example, if we were measuring the conversion rate of users subscribing to our email list, the rate would be the number of users who submitted the subscription form over the number of users who clicked on the subscription page.

Why are conversion rates important?

Conversion rates are key to identifying how well your online business is doing. Whether it be purchases, open rates on emails, social media followers, or so forth, knowing how often users end up doing what you want can be used to identify what you need to do in the future. Pages with high views and clicks, for example, can help you understand what your users want to see. The same applies idea applies with low conversion rates. If your email subscription form’s conversion rate is low, it is a sign that it may need re-worked or edited. Overall, by having a metric that reflects the success of your desired business goals, you can approach optimizing your site with data-backed decisions.

What is a good eCommerce conversion rate?

When people talk about conversion rates, they are often talking about eCommerce conversion rates. eCommerce conversion rates are the rate of overall user purchases and orders. In the case of monetary gain, a good eCommerce conversion rate is between 2% – 5%.

How do I increase my conversion rate?

Meet the customer where they are

The first step to increasing your conversion rate is making your customers feel seen and heard. To do this, we need to know our target audience intimately. What are they struggling with? What are their obstacles? What kind of solution are they looking for? Having answers to such questions allows us to create relatable and appealing content by clearly showing them that we understand what they want and need.

Have an enticing offer

Whether it be buying a product or signing up for emails, it is important to tell users what they will gain by doing so. After all, if they don’t know the benefits of converting, it makes converting less enticing. Explain the benefits of converting. If we want them to subscribe for our email list, for example, tell them what kind of information they will gain, what potential special deals they could be sent, and so forth.

Make it easy to convert

Both physically and mentally, converting should be an easy decision to make. Meeting the customer where they are and laying out the benefits clearly already makes converting an easy decision mentally. But we also need to make sure it is easy to physically purchase our products, fill out our email forms, schedule a consultation, and so forth. It should be easy to find the add to cart button, for example. Forms are more likely going to be filled out if they only contain a few fields. Many times, making converting easy involves making the option to convert obvious and making the process short and sweet.

Want to learn more?

To boost conversion rates, we need to optimize our websites to create the best user experience we can. Check out our blog for more tips and tricks to improve your website and optimization process!  If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

When it comes to optimizing our sites, there are many factors we need to monitor and adjust to ensure that our users have the best experience possible. One factor that can heavily impact our sites performance and user experience is bot traffic on our pages.

What are bots?

Bots are programs that are automated to complete specific tasks. A bot could be programmed to crawl a website, make a social media post, block ads, or so forth. Overall, bots are tools that can be used to quickly accomplish repetitive tasks on the internet.  More often than not, these bots interact with everything on the internet, including our sites.

There are good and bad reasons a bot could interact with our site. For example, Google uses bots to crawl and index our sites, ranking our sites and making them visible in Google search queries. Google’s bots are important for getting our site out there for future customers. Beyond searchability, bots can help create better users experiences as well through blocking ads, monitoring your site for analytics and issues, automatically posting content, and many other tasks.

However, there are also negative reasons a bot can visit a site. Stealing content, serving spam, denying service, and other malicious acts have been done through the use of bots.

What are some impacts of Bots?

When it comes to bots, there are multiple ways they can impact our sites, for better or for worse.

Performance

Bot traffic can slow down our pages while they interact with our site, negatively impacting other users. Since slow user experience can cause users to leave a site, bots can be programmed to interact with your site for the purpose of denying customers easy access to your site. Even good bots, such as crawler and indexer bots, can cause the performance of our site to decrease.

Reputation

Depending on what a bot is doing on your site, your site’s reputation can be impacted. Bots that share quality content or answer user questions with ease, such as chatbots, can improve your users experience and thus your reputation. However, on the other hand, bots can be used to spread spam onto your website, such as bad reviews or malicious links. While these bots are fake, they mimic the human language well enough that the content they share can give your site a bad reputation.

Security

While bots are not inherently a threat to security, they can be used to steal user information as well as to attack our sites. Bots can be programmed to collect sensitive user information as a customer fills out a form on your site as well as share phishing links on your site. They can also be programmed to make your site not function properly, attacking your sites ability to serve customers through a denial of service attack.

Analytics

Since bots can visit your site, the data your analytics software collects can be skewed by bot interaction. Whether it be intentional, such as through a denial of service attack, or accidental as bots crawl your site, your traffic data may have weird anomalies. These anomalies can make it hard to how well your site is really doing.

How do I protect my site from bots?

Since there are both good and bad bots, we need to be able to let the good bots in while keeping the bad bots out. There are a few steps we can use to identify bad bots and limit the negative impacts good bots can have.

To start, we should watch our site data carefully. If you are using Google Analytics, for example, watch for anomalies in your traffic. Is there a sudden spike in traffic for no apparent reason? Is there a page on your site that has an unusual number of visitors, but not real user interactions? Is there an increase in failed logins? Anomalies like these can be a sign that a bot is negatively impact your site, and possibly for malicious reason.  

Following anomalies in our analytics, we should block any identified bad bots from our site. We can do this through blocking its IP address. Since bots are visiting our sites through the internet, they must have an IP address to even start. Since blocking bots essentially by hand can be inefficient and at times impossible, we can also use an IP blocklist to preemptively block addresses that we consider suspicious or dangerous.

Since even good bots can impact our site by putting a strain on our pages, it’s important to make sure that we optimize our robot.txt files. Robot.txt files are a way we can communicate and direct crawler bots, such as Googles indexing bots, on how they should traverse our website. Here we can establish rules on where these bots can go, what they can click, and so forth. By having an optimized robot.txt file, we can limit the performance impact these bots can have on our site.

Want to Learn More?

Bot traffic is just one of many factors we need to consider when optimizing our site. Check out our blog for more tips and guides on how we can make our sites better! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website,join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

As we design and optimize our websites, its important to make sure that our sites are accessible to all of our users. This includes users with disabilities. Since the internet is both public and ingrained into everyday life, the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) has rules and guidelines on how to create websites with accessible designs.

What is ADA Compliance?

Since access to the internet and its content is important, the ADA legally requires websites to be ADA Compliant. ADA Compliance is a collection of guidelines that determine if a user with disabilities can use your website. One of the most recognized guides for digital accessibility is the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG). There are different levels of compliance according to the WCAG:

• Level A – some users can access your site while others cannot.
• Level AA – most users can access your site with only a few users who cannot.
• Level AAA – your website is accessible by essentially all users.

For website developers, we should aim to be either level AA or AAA compliance.

Why is ADA Compliance Important?

There are a few reasons why having an ADA compliant website is important. The most obvious one is upholding the law: if your site isn’t accessible, legal actions can be taken against your business. An inaccessible site is at risk of being sued and having settlements placed against them, which can cost the business money and damage the business’ reputation both before and after legal proceedings. After all, legal fees aren’t cheap, and overhauling a website to be ADA compliant costs time and money.

From a business perspective, by being ADA compliant, we can create a site that is inclusive to all sorts of users. There are millions of potential customers with disabilities that could be interested in our products and services. Our sites should be consumable by any user interested in what we have to offer.

How do I make an ADA Compliant Website?

The WCAG is divided into 4 basic principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. By creating a website that enables all four of these principles for our users, our site would be consider accessible. Let’s take a look at some key areas on our sites where barriers can exist that deny accessibility.

Text

Depending on the size of our text, as well as the type of font we use, our content can be hard to read for users with disabilities. Make sure that the fonts you choose on your site are easy to read and can be adjusted in size. For users who are blind, it’s important that your content is readable by tools such as screen readers.

Colors

Depending on the colors you use on your site, some users may be unable to perceive your content fully. Color choice for your text and background, for example, can determine if your pages are readable. Beyond that, using colors to give cues to users for links, call to actions, and error cues can fall flat if a user cannot see those colors. Make sure that your color choices contrast well so that they are readable. This includes avoiding colors that colorblind users would not be able to see.

Images Assets & Videos

While visual assets such as images, videos, graphs, and illustrations help our sites stand out, some users will be unable to see or hear them well. For such users its important to make use of alternate text in our html and to include captions into any video media we share.

Navigation

Navigation is important to the user experience of your site. For user who explore your site via mouse, your navigation menus should be large enough to easily see and interact with. For users who navigate via keyboard, your site may need table of contents or site maps to easily explore your content. Overall, the key to good navigation is to have multiple options so that users can reach your pages in the way they are most comfortable with.

Online Forms

Online forms can be frustrating for all users alike. However, for users with disabilities, we need to consider how easy it is to use, read, and understand our forms. Including labels that can be read by a screen reader is important in order to tell users what each form block is. Clear instructions should be available, as well as clear error indicators that can be read and seen when incorrect or missing information is present.

Tool Compatibility

In order for certain users to interact with our site, they may need to use special tools that aid them in interpreting page content. Screen readers, for example, need to be able to understand your pages. This means that the structure of our pages needs to be readable to by such tools, as well as convey the same information that other users have access to.

Time sensitive actions

Sometimes, when a user is trying to login or complete a form, there is a timer set that will cause the page to become invalid or reset. There also may be content on pages that visual move around, such as slideshows in our banners or GIFs. Its important to make sure that we give all users enough time to consume and input information.

Reportability

Realistically, as we create new pages and add new features to our websites, users may run into issues where our site isn’t accessible. To ensure that we can identify and fix these issues, we should have a way for users to report to us any accessibility issues they run into.

Conclusion: Equal User Experience is Key

When designing a site for accessibility, it is important to keep in mind that the user experience of all users should be equal. Users who are disabled shouldn’t be unable to explore your content, but should instead have means to explore it in the ways that they can. The experience may be different in the sense that some users may be unable to see your images or hear your videos, for example, but through ADA compliance, they should still be able to obtain the important information within those assets. Our sites are optimized for turning visitors into customers, and we want it to remain compelling no matter how a user absorbs them.

Want to Learn more?

Interested in learning more about ADA Compliance and WCAG? Check out the current documentation available for WCAG. If you want to see more content like this on our blog, or need assistance with ADA Compliance on your site, contact us! We can help you through it.

Interested in exploring tools you can use to check and refine your ADA Compliance? Check out Userway with our affiliate link!

With the popularity of ChatGPT skyrocketing recently, it’s hard not to think about Artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications on our workflows. Many companies have already incorporated a variety of AI software into their business process. How can we start using AI to further our eCommerce goals?

What is AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the process of teaching machines to mimic human intelligence. AI software, such as ChatGPT, are trained through large collections of data to provide educated, human-like results to the tasks we implement them in.

In the case of ChatGPT, the AI software is a language model that answers questions and scenarios given by users through its training in human conversation and knowledge. Other AI software has targeted a variety of tasks, such as content creation and editing, analytics, security, and customer care. While this may sound like a means of replacing human workers, AI in its current state is a more of a tool rather than a replacement.

What are the Pros & Cons of AI?

Benefits of AI

In terms of using AI in our business processes, there are multiple benefits, as well as a collection of limitations we should keep in mind as well use these tools. To start, some benefits we can gain from AI software are:

• Reduced time to complete routine tasks – One of the most useful ways we can utilize AI for is cutting down the amount of time we need to complete simple, routine tasks. For example, for marketing tasks, we can utilize AI software to do preliminary research, create outlines or drafts, and even come up with ideas for us when we are stuck.
• Access to real-time analytics on your business – With the help of AI and machine learning, we can analyze how our business is doing in real time, as well as obtain courses of action and recommendations. From security risks to customer product suggestions, AI can help us quickly react to anomalies or patterns that humans may not be able to quickly identify.
• Ability to Research new topics quickly – Since AI software consume large amounts of data in order to learn, we can use tools such as ChatGPT to get quick overviews of research topics.
• Improved customer experience – Due to its analytics capabilities, AI software can help us identify trends in customer behavior quickly, as well as create personalized experiences for them. From personalized offerings to automated customer service, AI can tailor the user experience per user.
• Innovation through predictive analytics – By analyzing huge amounts of data, AI can help us identify new opportunities. For example, AI can help us note patterns that we can use to either establish correlations, or even identify gaps that we can fill as businesses.

Limitations of AI

As stated before, AI at the time of writing this article is better used as a tool rather than a full-on replacement for human work. This is due to the following limitations of AI software:

• Lack of creativity – Since AI is taught on data sets, creating new ideas is difficult for AI to do. AI software only knows as much as you give it access to, and while it can create written content or art, all of its creations are based on previously explored ideas rather than new ones. It’s up to us to identify those opportunities still with the help of AI.
• Cost of implementation – Fully incorporating AI into your business can be expensive, especially when it comes to complete solutions of customizing AI software to suite your existing infrastructure.
• Questionable accuracy – While AI can identify patterns and share its analysis with users, its knowledge base and understanding of human concepts can be limited. Due to this, you can’t take everything it says as the truth. For one, AI is trained on data sets that can contain inadvertent biases. Secondly, AI shares patterns that may contain inaccurate information. For example, while using ChatGPT, facts such as time, place, or people may be merged together, creating false narratives.
• Concerns about privacy implications – When using AI software, it’s hard to know where the data it was trained on came from. How do you cite AI content? Furthermore, if we put our customer data into AI software, what happens to the data? How are we making sure our customers’ privacy is upheld? Making sure to have answers to these questions is important when considering using AI software.
• The risk of dependency – While AI offers us enhanced, powerful tools, it is important to remember that it is not a full solution. Human hands and outside sources of knowledge are still needed to effectively run your business. Growing dependent on AI can lead to vulnerabilities for your business.  

How can I use AI in my business?

Getting started with AI can be daunting, so it is best to start with small steps. To start, we can utilize AI software to do some of the preliminary work of our most common tasks. Marketing, for example, can be a good place to get started. To dive into a few, AI can help us in our efficiency and optimization goals in our market research, content creation, and SEO strategies.

Market Research

As another reference, we can use AI software to help us quickly get a bigger picture of our market, competitors, customers, and so forth. Using AI software such as ChatGPT, we can use AI to identify patterns in our market. With those patterns in mind, we can start finding gaps in our industries that we can use to stand out amongst the competition. On top of identifying business opportunities, we can use AI to quickly research best practices in our markets as well as tools and resources.

Content Creation

When creating content for our users, we can us AI software to speed up the process. From social media posts and blogs to product descriptions and our email campaigns, AI can help us get through the preliminary creation steps. Ever get writers block? AI can help! Ideas, keywords, outlines, and drafts can be made quickly with the help of AI, cutting the process time and keeping tasks moving. Advanced marketing, such as personalized product recommendations and emails, can even be optimized with AI by identifying buying patterns and user preferences for you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In our SEO strategies, AI software can help us identify new areas of opportunity.  From finding related keywords to quickly analyzing our current SEO work, AI can help us enhance our SEO strategies with data-backed recommendations. AI software can also help weigh the impact of our changes by predicting the future performance of our new content. Overall, new, viable paths can emerge from using AI to aid our SEO process.

Want to read more on AI?

AI is evolving fast, and new use cases are being explored. If you are interested in reading more about AI, contact us! Tell us what you want to learn about, and we can help you through it.

With Google’s Universal Analytics soon to be deprecated and replaced by Google Analytics 4 (GA4), many website owners are beginning the adapt their workflows to GA4. Since GA4 is structurally different than its predecessor, its reports, measurements, and visualized metrics vary from Universal Analytics, making a one-to-one transition impossible. However, due to popular demand, one metric from Universal Analytics has returned: Bounce Rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a metric that businesses can use to visualize how their pages (and site as a whole) are doing. Bounce rate is the total number of single page sessions over the total number of entrances on the page. Simply put, bounce rate is the number of times users come to your page and leave without taking any important action. In this case, we want users to click on our links, buttons, or navigation bars to explore our content. Not clicking on anything results as a bounce. This metric is a popular way to identify what pages are not engaging enough for users and need improved.

Why did Google get rid of Bounce Rate?

While bounce rate is a useful tool, it doesn’t paint a completely accurate picture of our websites. By assuming that a user who does not click on anything after they arrive to our site as a bounce, we are saying that those users were not engaged with our content. Bounce rate does not take into account the amount of time a user spends on our landing page before leaving. For sites that have long, content filled landing pages, a user could have been exploring the landing page for 5 minutes before leaving. Spending 5 minutes on our page clearly shows that the user was interested by our content, but bounce rate does not consider that scenario.

To overcome this limitation, Google’s GA4 replaced bounce rate with a new metric: Engaged session. Engage session allows us to track when a user was engaged with more granularity but taking into account both time and actions. An engaged session is a session that results in an action (a click) OR lasts more than 10 seconds.  By taking time into consideration, engaged sessions more accurately identify the amount of users who are attracted to our content.

However, changing to new metrics mean that businesses have to change their analytics strategy. While changes to the way we use Google analytics is inevitable, it was too sudden for some users, resulting in dissatisfaction. In July of 2022, due to popular demand, Google added bounce rate to GA4 as an optional metric.

How do I add Bounce Rate & Engaged Sessions to my reports?

Both bounce rate and engaged sessions are metrics that will need to be manually selected in order to be viewed. Here is how you can get start tracking these metrics in your GA4 account:

First, go to the Engagement tab of your Reports section, followed by the Pages and Screens tab.

Next, click the pencil icon in the right-hand corner. If you do not see the pencil icon, you may not have permission to edit your GA4 reports.

Click on the Metrics tab.

To add our desired metrics, click Add Metric.

To add Engaged Session to our report, simply begin to type out “engaged session” and you will see the metric appear. Click on it to add it to the list.

To add Bounce Rate to our report, we type out “bounce rate” and you will see the metric pop up. Click on it to add it to the list.

Once you have added your desired metrics, click Apply in the bottom righthand corner.

Upon applying, you will see your new metrics included in your report. If you are content with them, click Save and then Save changes to current report. Confirm your decision.

Congrats! Once saved, you have successfully added bounce rate and engaged sessions to your reports!

Want to Learn More about GA4?

Whether we like it or not, Google Analytics 4 is here to stay. Check out our blog to learn more about GA4! Want to get started on setting up your GA4 property but don’t know where to start? Check out our free GA4 Crash Course to jump start your GA4 journey!

Starting July 1^st, 2023, Google’s Universal Analytics (UA) will stop collecting data. To continue collecting data, users will have to transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google’s improved analytics system. To make sure that users will transition accordingly, Google will begin auto-migrating users to Google Analytics 4 starting March 2023. However, what does that mean?

Who does Google’s Auto-migration effect?

Before we dive into what Google’s auto-migration includes, it is important to note who this migration effects. There are two categories of users that this migration can impact:

• Users who have a Universal Analytics account and haven’t begun transitioning – If you have been holding off on transition your UA account, Google will automatically create a Google property based on it.
• Users who have created an incomplete GA4 property based on their existing Universal Analytics account – if you began transition your UA account to GA4, but haven’t finished, Google will automatically attempt to finish it.

At first glance, auto-migration may sound great! However, Google themselves strongly encourage user’s to manually migrate their UA properties to GA4 to ensure the quality of their data. The auto-migration is a means of pushing users to begin using GA4 before UA is deprecated rather than a full migration. Google’s auto-migration is not a one size fits all solution.

What is Google’s Auto-migration?

Google’s auto-migration will help you begin your transition to GA4. The following events will occur during the transition process:

• A GA4 property will be created.
• UA property-level users will be copied over to your GA4 property.
• Site tags will be copied and be reused when possible.
• UA events will be reproduced in the GA4 model.
• UA events & destination goals will be reproduced as GA4 conversions.
• Audiences will be migrated.
• Google Ads links will be migrated.
• UA conversions used in Google Ads will be swapped with GA4 equivalents.
• UA audiences used in Google Ads will be paired with GA4 equivalents.

For more details about these changes, check out this Google Analytics Help article.

Note: Google Analytics 360 properties will not be auto-migrated

360-enabled UA properties are not included in Google’s auto-migration process. For these properties, you will have to manually migrate them to your GA4 property.

What are the downsides of letting Google migrate my property?

Less Control Over your Migration Plan

By letting Google auto-migrate your properties to GA4, your migration plan may become more complex. Google’s auto-migration is intended to help you start your transition to GA4, not complete it, which means some loose ends may remain. Finding those loose ends could be a hassle, or worse, cost the company money if vital reports aren’t working like they are supposed to. For reports and properties that are critical to your business, manual migration is highly suggested.

GA4 is not UA

While Google’s auto-migration will make it easy to move over simple UA properties to GA4, it’s important to keep in mind that GA4 will not work exactly as UA did. GA4 has shifted its model to focus on customer retention rather than customer acquisition alone. This means that existing UA properties may not fully utilize the capabilities and value that GA4 has to offer. Instead, it is important to make sure you approach GA4 as a new system that requires new data collection and monitoring strategies.

Steep Learning Curve

Since GA4 is a new system, some UA metrics do not exist in GA4. During the auto-migration, Google will swap UA properties that do not exist in GA4 with the GA4 equivalent. This means that, when you take a look at your GA4 property, you may not recognize valuable metrics that your company relies on. By not manually transition your site, you will be left having to figure out all of GA4’s changes on your own. Learning about GA4 before the UA is deprecated is important to continuing to obtain valuable data from these analytics tools.

Can Google’s auto-migration be beneficial?

If you consider your UA account to have basic configurations, you may wonder if auto-migration would be fine. However, the more important question to ponder when deciding what to do about Google auto-migration is whether or not the analytics data is imperative to your business flow. If you have not fully incorporated Google analytics into your business strategy, or were just getting started, the auto-migration process probably won’t do much harm.  If you rely heavily on Google analytics, however, manually migrating important aspects of your UA account is highly encouraged.

Can I Opt-out?

At this point in time, the opt-out period has ended. However, there are still some ways that you can avoid Google’s auto-migration process:

---

Method 1: Delete your Auto-generated GA4 Property

For users who only have a Universal Analytics property and don’t want your auto-migrated GA4 property, you can delete the property.

Go to Admin.

Make sure you are on your desired Universal Analytics property.

Click on GA4 Setup Assistant in the Property Column.

Next to Connect property, click Disconnect.

Confirm your Decision.

Now, you can safely go to your auto-generated GA4 property and delete it. First, go to Admin.

Click on your list of properties to make sure you are on the auto-generated GA4 property.

In the Property Column, click Property Settings.

Click Move to Bin.

Confirm your decision.

---

Method 2: Save the rest of your GA4 Migration for Later

For users who have an incomplete Google Analytics 4 property and don’t want Google auto-complete the rest based on their connected UA account, we can tell Google to leave certain configurations alone.

Go to Admin.

Make sure you are on your desired GA4 property.

Click Setup Assistant in the Property Column.

Click on the far right arrow of a task you don’t want Google to complete of you. Click Mark as complete.

Repeat this step for any tasks you want to complete on your own time.

Want to start learning about Google Analytics 4?

Whether we like it or not, Google Analytics 4 is here to stay. Check out our blog to learn more about GA4! Want to get started on setting up your GA4 property but don’t know where to start? Check out our free GA4 Crash Course to jump start your GA4 journey!