How much does it cost to migrate from

Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4

Introduction

You are on our website for either of the 3 reasons :

You are evaluating us for the fitment of a project
You are checking out our content
You are looking to be part of our team

I am writing this blog for the audience with objective 1 ie, you are evaluating whether we are the right fit for your requirements or not – specifically, when it comes to Google Analytics 4 projects.

This post should help you assess our working process and also estimate the cost of our services.

PLEASE NOTE : LIKE UNIVERSAL ANALYTICS, GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4 IS ALSO FREE OF COST. THE POST PRESENTS THE COST OF OUR SERVICES AND NOT THE TOOL.

I am structuring this post to present the following information :

General hourly costing
Caveats of hourly costing model
Requirements for ensuring a successful project
Cost of basic GA4 implemntation
Cost of GA4 ecommerce implementation
Cost of GA4 form tracking
Other factors affecting cost calculations

General Hourly Costing

So, here is a thing – In general, DataVinci charges 40 USD per hour for one time or ad hoc projects. Whatever we charge is goining to be dependent on the effort that is involved in enabling the solution on your digital asset.

One more thing : Don’t expect that we will do only a 40$ assignment 🙂 It is an estimate for you considering you have a batch of projects for us 🙂

Now, If its simple setup and you are OK to work with plugins (if they exist for your platform) then the cost will be low. But, if it is going to a complex one, then the cost will increase.

But, If the project is really complex and is going to take considerable effort, we can also negotiate the pricing. Alright?

We have delivered end to end GA4 implmentation projects in the range of 300 USD to 5,600 USD. While writing this blog, I am sincerely trying my best to present to you a totally transparent information. My objective is help you assess whether we are the right agency for you or not. We value our time and we value your time more than ours.

General caveats of hourly costing

In general hourly costing is not preferred unitl and unless you are testing us to go on a retainer based arrangement.

We rather prefer if we can agree on a set scope where in we can provide the estimates to you before commencing the project. Once you get our estimates, you can asssess them and request for any additional details that are required.

Hourly based costing has issues, plenty of issues :

Time Is Tracked Manually

Time is tracked manually in most of the tools - Harvest, Clockify, Taimer etc. etc. Manual tracking can get erronous. Someone can forget to turn the timer ON. Or worst - someone can forget to turm the timer OFF? Plus, there is always a feeling of distrust with timer based arrangement. Till the time the invoice is raised, the client is tensed on how much effort the delivery will take. We as delivery team are tensed that the client will scrutinize the time logs and it is not always possible to explain every mintute. It is so peaceful at both the ends - If we can commit to you a quote in advance and you can sign that off once you are fine with the estimates. The interests of both parties are take care of like this.

Poor Bandwidth Management

In a fixed scope project it is very simple to communicate to the sales and BD team on how much bandwidth is available with the operations team. But, with an Ad hoc project, the bandwidth management is very difficult. Hence, it is preferred that we agree on scope where we keep our side of the deal and you keep yours.

Requiments for ensuring a successful project

Proper Approvals & Permissions

This is like a fundamental requiement and seems like a no-brainer. But often, approvals become a major blocker. We are external partners and often company policies from various departments do not allow a smooth working arrangement with external vendors. For example, there can be a strict IT and compiance policy in your company that you can work with only those agencies which are holding certain ISO certifications. Hence, it is preferred that you cross check with your key stakeholders on what are the requirements to work with external partners like us and then only proceed for scoping.

Bandwidth of your developers

This one is the most challenging aspect of delivering a smooth analytics implementation. Lets take a hypothetical case - you initate a project with us at the beginging of the month, we provide you with all the documentation and dataLayer instructions. But, when you go to your development team, they inform you that they cannot incorporate any updates for the next 2 months. After 2 months, there is no gurantee on which all other projects our team gets occupied with. Further, after 2 months you cannot expect us to prioritize your project if we have committed to other clients. Hence, it is preffered to start projects when your development team has the bandwidth to support us.

Proper Tool Accesses

To work on your stack, we obviously need proper accesses to it. But, the nature of our work is such that you will be sharing your data with us. Even though all our engagements are covered under strict NDA clauses (which you can customize as well) - at the end of the day we are getting access to your data. Now, depending on your company policies - you can grant us the accesses we need or you cannot. It is better to check on this first, otherwise there is considerable back and forth which usually results into a blocker only.

Proper Site Or App Accesses

There can be certain sections of your website which only your customers can access, but they will be important from analytics and tracking perspective. To access those sections, we will need accounts created for us. In case there are any transactions involved, we will need test card details or 100% OFF discount vouchers, such that we can make multiple conversions to debug the journey. It is also preferred that you have informed your CRM team about our test conversions so that there is no confusion at their end if they see an unusual spike in activity.

Cost of basic GA4 Implementation

We prefer to do the setup with Google Tag Manager. I am assuming here that you already have GTM enabled on your site. If not, then GTM enablement will cost you extra, but I will keep that one outside the scope of this post.

For a simple setup, here are required steps :

Gathering relevant accesses
Creation of property in GA account – creating data streams etc.
Configuration of the property – any filters, enhancements etc.
Installing the GA4 tag in GTM
Debug and validation
Handover and signoff

This will not take us more than an hour to do. Hence the price of a simple page load based GA4 tracking will cost you 40$.

Cost of GA4 Ecommerce Implementation

Assuming standard conditions, this should not take more than 2 hours. Factoring in the previous 1 hour, this should roughly take 3 hours and hence 40X3 = 120$

The price of this one can vary based on the platform that you are using. For the scope of this blog post I am focussing on 2 key platforms viz. Shopify and Woocommerce

I will start with WooCommerce.

Usually, we prefer to work with Google Tag Manager for Word Press Plugin. It is a popular and stable plugin. We have used it on numerous projects and as such never had any issues. So, if you and your team are OK to work with this plugin then that is not much of an effort from our side (assuming standard conditions).

So, adding to the steps I have covered above for standard page load enablement. We need additional enhancements for enabling Ecom, which will be :

Gathering access to your WordPress
Configuring the plugin for GA4 Ecom
Configuring GTM based on the plugin requirements
Installing the tags, triggers and variables
Debug and validation
Handover and signoff

Now, for Shopify.

The thing is as of creation of this blog, there is no direct integration or plugin available with Shopify that allows you to track all the Ecom data points viz. Product detail views, Add to cart, checkout and purchase.

Further, the possibility of tracking specifically checkout data points will entirely depend on the tier of your Shopify account. Other than Shopify Plus accounts, it is not possible to inject any codes in the checkout.

So, for non-Shopify Plus accounts. You can track – Product detail views, Add to cards, Cart opens and Purchases. But, you will not be able to use data from GA4 for you chekcout optimization. OK?

Now, the pricing for Shopify will further depend on 1 more thing :

You have developers to implement the DataLayer or not.

So, lets take case 1 – you have developers. So, our role is simply to provide you the dataLayer specification document and then validate whether your developers have enabled the dataLayer as per our guidelines or not. With this provision here will be the steps for us:

Create the DataLayer specification document for recording Product details views, Add to carts, Cart opens and Purchase
Configuring GTM to pick the values from the added dataLayer
Debug and validation
Handover and sign off

Assuming standard conditions, this should not take more than 8 hours. Factoring in the previous 1 hour, this should roughly take 9 hours and hence 40X6 = 360$

The price will go up, if your developers need more support, more detailed documentation (everything with images and markers and arrows etc.), there is back and forth during validations etc. Ok?

Now, case 2 – you don’t have developers to enable the Datalayers that we supply. In that case, we will need to work with your theme code base and the effort involved is quite subjective. You can also use tools like Elevar which provide various tiers, but have additional monthly subscription fee.

But, if you don’t want to go with tools like Elevar and are looking for cusom solutions then budget for additional 20-30 hours. I am not saying that it will take that much, but it is not possible to comment on complexities we might discover in your code base. It can also take higher. After all tailor made solutions are always expensive.

So, a tailor made solution without developer support will cost you 800+ USD ( Focus on +). I will be transparent over here – in one of the Shopify+ projects the commercials were 4,000 USD for entire setup. It was a 100 hour ballpark project and took the team 2.5 weeks to implement, validate and deliver the entire stack.

The above figure of 800+ is applicable for any platform where developer support is not available.

Requiments for ensuring a successful project

The effort for tracking form submissions depends on 2 things :

The type of form you have on the site
The data you want to send along with form submission

What do I mean by the type of form ?

There are different kinds of forms – html5 based forms, single page applications, iframes etc. etc.

Google Tag Manager cannot detect all kinds of form submissions readily. Particularly, if you want to send data for valid submission. Hence, it is difficult to comment on the effort and possibility without understanding the nature of the form.

At times form submission tracking might not even be possible. The form can be through a tool, for example – Outgrow.co & in this case you might not even have access to inject any additional JS on Outgrow.

Now, the second thing – the data you want to send along with the form submissions. The primary requirement for this is that the data needs to be exposed in the DOM for GTM to pick it and send it across to analytics. If the data itself is not available, then we need that data to be passed in the dataLayer and will require developer support for this.

So, again if its a simple form and the data that needs to be pased to GA4 is also basic level, lets say just counting the number of submissions – then it will not take more than an hour. But, if its a complicated setup and the data that you need to send also requires customization then the effort will vary based on the requirements.

If its a simple form, should not take more than 1.5 hours. If your requirements are beyond that, then it can take time.

Other factors affecting cost calculations

Here are some factors that will also affect the cost of the project and its scope :

Depth of customization

The cost would obviously vary based on the amount of data points you want to track. For example, on the checkout journey, you want to track items like coupon submissions and codes, you want to track customer lifetime value post login, you want to track any errors that people encounter in the their journey etc. etc. And the effort of each item will entirely depend on what you want to get implemented and how.

Your process & documentation

This one is more applicable to agencies who are planning to sub-contract to us Google Analytics 4 projects. In this case, the cost can vary based on the internal processes and type of documentations you maintain for your clients. So, if there are certain procedural requirements, its better to let us know about that in advance to avoid any conflicts down the road.

Closing notes

I hope the post provides you some high level understanding of whether we are the right agency for you or not. But, I also hope that this post provides you with some information to keep into consideration whenever you plan to on-board any external partner.

If you want to proceed further with the discussion on any of your digital analytics projects with us. Please use the link below:

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