What does “Review your updated GA4 property” email from Google mean?
You may have received an email saying “Review your updated GA4 property” from Google today (4th August 2023).
What’s the deal?
Why has Google sent this email?
In the same way that GoogleBot sometimes ignores robot.txt – when it thinks the website owner made a mistake when setting disallow folders.
The GA bot is going to ignoring mark-as-done in GA4 migration wizard – when it thinks the website owner made a mistake ticking the box.
In this scenario the GA bot will automatically import GA3 goals and/or import GA3 audience into GA4, even though the website owner opted-out. Yikes!
Background
Inorder to hide the annoying GA3 migration banner. Many website owners & analysts, just ticked the 7/7 GA4 set-up wizard steps – regardless if these were completed or not.
Ticking the 7 steps, change the banner from a red warning to blue notification and it also prevent auto-migration from importing 2 of 7 steps for goal and audiences imports.
However, there was no validation in the 7 steps, to check if a task was actually completed or not! Thus, Google was left in a situation whereby many sites were only partially auto-migrated.
Furthermore, its impossible to know if a website owner actually intended to disable goal importing and audience importing, or if this was accidental just to disable the banner notification.
Thus, Google has decided to send a bulk email, warning all users that had auto-migration enabled and ticked these 2 of 7 steps that their goals and audience are going to be imported automatically!
Solution
Make sure auto-migrate is changed from ON to OFF in GA3 set-up wizard.
Then either:
a) manually run the Goal import wizard and import audiences using the GoogleSheet plugin.
or
b) disconnect GA3 from GA4 – to prevent any settings being imported.
Need help?
If you are at all confused by this or anything else Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager related, our Google Analytics consultants are here to help. Give us a call, email us or set up a virtual meeting today.
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