What are the benefits of switching to Google Universal Analytics?
Here is an extensive (but certainly not exhaustive) list of benefits to switching from Google Asynchronous Analytics to Google Universal Analytics. But first, I’ll summarize the major areas of benefits:
SUMMARY
Compared to Asynchronous, Universal is more dynamic, allowing you to make many changes to tracking from within the UI (User Interface) rather than having to edit the actual tracking code on the website. Also, Universal is built to interface with other systems (like Customer Management, Point Of Sale, etc.) and it allows you to upload 3rd party data into Analytics for richer analysis.
DETAILED BENEFITS OF UPGRADING TO UNIVERSAL
- Session timeout and campaign timeout periods are dynamically set within the Admin, not coded on the site.
- You can create Custom Search Engines in the Admin, in addition to the few dozen default SEs in GA.
- You can create Referral Exclusions to exclude certain referring domains in the Admin.
- You can create Search Term Exclusions to exclude certain organic keywords in the Admin.
- You can handle Session and Campaign Timeouts in the Admin.
- The new analytics.js tracking snippet allows faster page load times (which is a huge benefit for SEO) and fewer bugs.
- Custom Dimensions (formerly Custom Variables) are configured in the Admin.
- Tracking users across a Top Level Domain and its subdomains (i.e. www.site.com, shop.site.com, help.site.com) happens automatically. (Note: tracking users across multiple TLDs still requires extra code for Cross-Domain Tracking.)
- Enhanced Link Attribution improves the accuracy of In-Page Analytics.
- USER ID!!! Though not important to everyone, this is certainly an important new tool for many businesses using Universal Analytics. Universal allows you to track (without crossing the line into “Personally Identifiable” territory) a logged-in user across multiple devices, giving you a true overview of customer behavior.
- Best For Last: You don’t have a choice! In fact, Google has already migrated all accounts over to the new Universal Analytics. This is crucial for people to know because now if you go in to make any chance — say to the code for a Custom Variable — it will break your tracking! So it’s best to make a plan to upgrade all your tracking to come into line with the new Universal standards.
