Disable Automatic GA4 Property Creation

Lead Web Analyst

13 Mar 2023 2 mins read

From 1st March 2023, Google began to automatically create new GA4 properties, with configurations pulled from existing Universal Analytics (UA) properties.

Google will do this for all UA properties, even if you’ve been working on setting up GA4 to replace them - unless you have selected to opt-out.

Unfortunately, we expect the migration process to cause issues in both GA4 and Google Ads, so recommend opting out immediately.

Why should you opt-out of GA4 auto-migration?

The GA4 Setup Assistant contains a few tools that could support your move to GA4 - but running the tool automatically, without checks, will almost certainly create problems, and lead to inconsistencies in data collection.

For us the most pressing issue is that Google plans to rollout the migration without your knowledge or consent, despite advising that you should manually set up your GA4 property to avoid issues:

By far the most serious problems are with how the auto-migration impacts Google Ads.

If your Universal Analytics property is linked to Google Ads then the auto-migration may replace any imported conversions and audiences with those it creates in GA4.

One implication is that Google Ads may start to bid on conversions that you haven’t verified or tested.

Opting out of the automatic migration will prevent Google creating a new GA4 property linked to a UA property - and give you the time to handle this process yourself before 1st July 2023.

We’d therefore suggest doing this immediately.

How to opt-out of the GA4 auto-migration?

Open up the admin panel of a Universal Analytics property in your account. On the property column, select GA4 Setup Assistant at the top of the list.

On the property column, select GA4 Setup Assistant at the top of the list.

On the GA4 Setup Assistant find the last section titled Automatically set up a basic Google Analytics 4 property, and toggle the slider off.

Note that you will need to opt-out in ALL of your Universal Analytics properties.