Why have Google made using their Analytics package so difficult to set up ?

I’m asking this question as a follow-up to my recent blog on the whys and wherefores of Big Tech software upgrades, and whether they are fair to the consumer. 

As a frequent blogger, I regularly check the internal Blogspot tracking system to see how frequently my blogs are being viewed. Although the internal system is useful and has always been reliable, it is by its nature only there to provide basic tracking. It doesn't therefore provide some of the more useful features available via Google Analytics, such as where viewers are located and what screens they have viewed most often. I have a Google Sites website which is connected to Analytics and this does seem to have been effectively tracked over the past couple of years.

When I first opened my blogspot account, indexing on Google occurred pretty quickly (unlike the Google Sites website which took them 15 months !) and an Analytics Universal property was created automatically and did start registering some hits.

However, all that changed in July of this year when Google shut down monitoring on all Universal properties. The hits quickly dried up and we were confronted with a message when logging on to Analytics that basically said ‘upgrade  to GA4 or else’ if we wanted to get any further monitoring data. 

Having looked at Google's official instructions and got thoroughly confused as to what really needed doing to get tracking started again, I attempted to follow the recommended procedure. I did manage to set up a new GA4 property and a data stream which yielded a couple of hits, but on checking the internal system I found many more hits had occurred over the same tracking period which Analytics had missed completely. 

I’ve so far made 3 separate attempts at enlisting the help of the ‘Google Community’ to sort this out, but these have elicited zero responses so far. 

Interestingly, the Sites website tracking seems to have gone on uninterrupted, despite the exhortation in red to update it to GA4 which appears every time I check on its Analytics entry.

To cut what is already far too long a story short, I’ve now abandoned using Analytics for Blogspot and gone back to the internal tracking system to avoid wasting any more time on what appears to be a hopeless cause.

Looking at the web, I notice that despite the plethora of instruction videos from Google and others on how to upgrade from UA to GA4 (which in itself is revealing), there are plenty of reports of users having problems tracking their websites. At least I won’t be the only one to have struggled with this particular 'Big IT' mess-up.

The moral of the story is, I think ‘…if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it..’ to which we should perhaps add the rider: ‘…if you must fix it, make sure it b****y-well works afterwards...’

Would that big tech took more notice of this important principle…..

First published 10.9.23

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