How to Save Universal Analytics Historical Data

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If you have data on Universal Analytics, do know that it won’t last forever. In 2023, this service will stop collecting new data, and users will lose access to the Universal Analytics interface and API on July 1, 2024. After that, all historical data will be deleted, and you will no longer be able to view or use it.

Imagine years of valuable statistics just disappearing! Sounds scary, doesn’t it? The only way to continue working with that data would be to download and save it. Let me show you how to do so effectively.

Why is Universal Analytics data important for business?
For many businesses, Universal Analytics is the only source of historical data. Although Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was released in October 2020, many businesses didn’t make the switch in time or didn’t set it up correctly, which left them without this historical analytics data.

Universal Analytics data are used to compare current saudi arabia number dataset with past periods. The results of this analysis allow you to:

see seasonal trends, for example, by month, quarter, or year;
identify increases or decreases in audience, traffic, conversions, revenue, and other indicators;
analyze the impact of specific actions or campaigns and identify weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The old version of Google Analytics will soon be no longer available. Unless you save your data, you won’t be able to analyze your past strategies and make future decisions based on these insights. Besides, it’s nice to have a copy of past statistics as a record of your company’s history and achievements.

Different ways to save Universal Analytics data
The only way to save your data is to export it to another platform where you can store, analyze, and visualize it. There are two ways to do that.

Manual export
You have to select time periods and export data to Excel files, bit by bit. It’s easy and free of charge, but it comes with a number of risks:

Missed insights. You won’t be able to export everything at once because Google samples the data over a long period of time. So you have to manually select smaller date ranges and download each one separately. It is very easy to make a mistake during this process.
Limited analysis. If some of the data is dropped during the sampling process, you won’t be able to perform deep analysis.
Tedious process. You will spend many hours doing this, and there is a risk of not achieving the desired result due to mistakes.
Working with manually exported data is like reading random pages of a book. You won’t get the whole picture.

Automatic export
This method uses the API to export historical data from Universal Analytics. The API allows you to download and process large amounts of information in various formats.

You can use this method to collect and store your statistics in any database. The choice of database is yours and can include the storage you already use: cloud or local, without any restrictions.