Important Update to Google Tags (for Google Analytics)

Tony Villanova - October 23, 2020

You may have noticed that Google sent out an email last week which caused a lot of confusion, because it said to upgrade to the latest tag within Google Analytics. This is going from analytics.js to gtag.js. Part of the reason it caused so much confusion is because obviously you want to make sure that you’re running the latest version of Google Analytics and people were concerned.

Questions came up, such as “Am I still recording data?” What do I need to do?

If you are currently running the older analytics.js tracking code your data is still being collected. We recommend you update to the latest version of Google Analytics (gtag.js) which is located in your Admin section under the Property settings of your Google Analytics Account. We recommend you remove all of the old Analytics code and deploy this updated tracking method through Google Tag Manager (GTM) rather than hard-coding gtag.js to every page of your site.

The great thing is that if you are currently running Google’s Tag Manager, which is how we recommend you deploy Google Analytics, then there’s no need to update to the latest version because Google Tag Manager keeps you at the latest version of analytics automatically.

An important point to mention is that a change like this is usually a case where Google is about to push updates to Analytics (new products or features) that require this new code to function properly. We’ll keep you up to date on some of the changes that could be happening, as well as some new features that are rolling out.

If you’re not using Tag Manager, now is the time to make that transition. If you need any assistance, please let us know.