Google analytics 4: opt-out of forced migration for already-migrated projects

[chalin]

The top 15 CNCF projects have been migrated to GA4:

• Migrate CNCF websites to GA4 #108

But recently, Google has decided that they'll force migrate projects (emphasis mine):

On July 1, 2023, this property will stop processing data. Starting in March 2023, for continued website measurement, you should create a new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property, or one will be created for you based on your original property and reusing existing site tags.

Their Learn more link opens on the following page: [UA→GA4] About automatically created Google Analytics 4 properties.

Why is this a problem? Because we've migrated many projects already, and in many situations (for technical reasons given in the note below), Google can't detect that we've done so. If Google is allowed to proceed, then we'll end up with duplicate GA4 accounts, which we don't want.

Google will be able to detect that we've created a GA4 site tag if we've connected it to the UA site tag. But in many cases, because the UA and GA4 site tags are not part of the same org, we can't connect them, so Google doesn't know about projects that we've migrated in such cases.

Even if we were able to connect the UA to the GA4 site tags of a migrated CNCF project, Google says that it may still force the migration of selected UA settings. But GA4 is very different from UA. E.g., a lot of manual event creation and configuration used to be required for UA, but with GA4, it comes "for free".

So, we'll need to make a pass over the 60+ migrated sites and opt out of the force migration. @chalin will be leading this, and handling UA accounts to which he has access and the rest of the tech docs team doesn't (rather than going through another cycle of requesting permissions for an account that will be going away soon).

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It might be worth asking whether it was worth migrating CNCF projects to GA4 manually if Google isn't going to force migration. IMHO, Google's forced migration is a stop-gap measure, probably because few UA accounts have been migrated. But, as I mentioned above, GA4 is very different from UA. A lot of manual event creation and configuration used to be required for UA, but with GA4, it comes "for free".

More importantly, GA4 organizations call for a different setup than UA organizations. For example, GA4 has a fine-grained notion of a data stream. A property can have multiple data streams, allowing support for, e.g., cross-site tracking, which helps provide more accurate analytics data.

The best approach is to assess the needs of any given project and manually setting up a GA4 org based on the project's particularities. (The best analogy I can think of is the following: suppose you had a program written in C and someone offered to automatically migrate it to C++. In doing so you'd probably end up with C encoded in C++. It would be better to "start from scratch", from an OO pov, in migrating your program to C++.)

[chalin]

Status update: all done but the following projects have been "opted-out"!

• Envoy.io: tracked via [Urgent] Opt-out of "Automatically set up a basic Google Analytics 4 property" envoyproxy/envoy-website#295
• Fluent projects (2): GA4 migration (and hence opt-out), has been left to the project since CNCF (and even the current maintainers), don't have access to the required resources.

I'm going to close this now since Envoy.io is being tracked separately. 🎉