in this video I’m going to show you how to determine which version of Google analytics is currently running on your website.

The countdown is on to July 1st 2023 when Universal analytics will no longer be supported or collecting data and you may not be aware of which one you’re on because perhaps an agency or a developer is handling that for you but here are three simple ways to determine which version you currently have on your website.

the first option is using a website that can determine what apps and what technology is running in the background of your website one example is built with and I have two example websites that are run built with through to show you what it looks like when you’re running GA4 versus universal analytics. I’ve just chosen these two websites pretty much at random I just typed in Perth in Google search and we have the Perth tourist center and we have destination Perth. So what we do is copy the URL of the website or in this case probably your own website and you go to BuiltWith which is simply builtwith.com and you post your website URL in there and click look up and pretty quickly it’ll give you some results. In the top section we’ve got analytics and tracking and we can see here we’ve got Google Analytics and we can see Google Universal analytics. So there is one easy way to determine which version of analytics you’re running.

If we have a look at destinationperth.com.au for comparison now we see under analytics and tracking two instances of Google analytics the first one is universal and the second one is ga4 so this tells us that Destination Perth is running both Universal analytics and GA4 in parallel and that was a recommended setup back when GA4 was first launched.

Now there may be some instances where BuiltWith cannot determine which version of analytics you’re running and in that case the second option is to use Google’s tag assistant browser extension for Google Chrome. The version you want to find is the tag assistant Legacy version all you need to do is search for tag assistant Legacy and you’ll get this website chromewebstore.google.com tag your system it’ll take us to the Chrome Web Store all we need to do is click on add to Chrome. Add extension and now we can see it’s been added to our browser up here.

Now what may happen to you like it happened just then for me is that the extension pops up in the little shortcut section here and then disappears. The way we can pin it so that we can always see it in that selection there is just to click on this extensions icon and look for the little pin next to the Legacy and now it’s there for when we need it now the way we use this extension is basically going to the website we want to run it on we click on the extension icon now the first time you run it there will be some options that you need to confirm and then each time you want to run it on the website. All you do is go to the extension click on it click enable then you will need to reload the website that you want to run it on.

So let’s reload this website and now you’ll see on the browser extension icon there’s a number two and that means it’s detected two tags on this website, let’s simply click on the tag to extend it and find out what they are. Now we can see it’s detected the global site tag and Google analytics and in both cases we can see that that begins with UA which stands for Universal analytics so we’ve determined again this time using Google tag assistant that Perth Visitor Center website is using Universal Analytics.

Let’s repeat the process for Destination Perth click the icon enable it refresh the website and check the results in this instance it’s detected five tags again we can see the global site tag and the universal analytics site tag but this time the global site tag starts with a ‘G’ and that helps us recognise that it is using GA4.

On to the third option of how to determine which version of analytics is running on a website and this one might be the scariest for people who aren’t used to using the expect Tool in Google Chrome but it’s not that scary all you need to do is click pretty much anywhere on the website and click inspect and then you’ll see this console come up and what we need to do is go to network what we need to type in here is collect and then we want to refresh the website now after the website has completely loaded you should be able to find an instance of collect if the website is using Google analytics and very basically if you see V equals one that’s version one and that tells us that it’s using Universal analytics let’s repeat it for Destination Perth so we can right click pretty much anyway click inspect go to network type in collect refresh the website and now we will see after a moment it loaded there so we had to wait for the website to completely load that we can see V equals one version one that’s Universal analytics but we can also see V equals to which is GA4.

So that’s three different ways that we’ve just confirmed that Perth tourist center needs to start thinking about upgrading to GA4 whereas Destination Perth is ahead of the game and they’ve already got GA4 installed.

I hope you find that helpful if you have any questions feel free to ask, cheers.