I've co-authored a new blog post for GDS, titled How GOV.UK is upgrading to Google Analytics 4. Read on for a bit of background.
Writing
Firstly, thanks go to my colleague Ian James for co-authoring this with me. Ian recently left GDS for another continent, and if you ever have the opportunity to hire him or work with him I would highly recommend it. He's an extremely capable frontend developer and an all-round top bloke.
This was the first post I've written with someone else, and it was surprisingly straightforward - I wrote a bit, Ian wrote a bit, we compared notes and tweaked the wording. Matt Hobbs even contributed a paragraph (see if you can spot which one).
It's another long one, weighing in at 1000+ words. Normally the recommended length is between 500 and 1000 words, but exceptions are made. Despite this, we could have probably written way more - the post assumes a certain baseline of Google Analytics knowledge and focusses mostly on the issue of web performance.
Background
This is a very specific post aimed at a very specific audience, namely other developers in government who are looking at upgrading their Google Analytics setup.
It was delayed quite a bit from the originally intended publication date. This turned out to be quite fortunate because a week ago some of the details in it had to change - Google pushed back the date when the old version of Google Analytics would be retired from next year to 2024. That's quite a big deal for a lot of developers who were facing the deadline, including us.
Unfortunately upgrading to Google Analytics 4 is still a potentially complicated business. I'm going to try to write some more on this site very soon to go over some wider things we learned during our implementation work.