Migrating a C# Integration from GA3 to GA4

Updated on Saturday, May 6, 2023

GA4

This blog has a couple of Google Analytics integrations - the popular posts list is pulled from GA, and the unnecessarily accurate count of non visitors in the footer. I just migrated from the GA3 API to the GA4 API. The backend for this blog is ASP.NET MVC with .NET 4.8. One day I might catch up with the cool kids and try to get on .NET Core, but not today.

Here's where I stubbed my toe:

I'm following this code sample to make my first GA4 call. After installing the NuGet package I couldn't find BetaAnalyticsDataClient anywhere. It turns out that there is a Google.Apis.AnalyticsData.v1beta package and a Google.Analytics.Data.V1Beta which is only available if you check 'Include prerelease' when searching. You want the second one. I'm not in love with BetaAnalyticsDataClient as a class name, it suggests all sorts of breaking changes are coming. My GA3 integration has ticked over for years with no changes. Maybe GA4 is going to be more like Google Ads and shank you with breaking changes every few months. Moving on...

Wow the error messages are good. Kudos to the API team. I'm so used to cryptic bullshit but this API tells you what you're doing wrong and sends back helpful pointers and even URLs. Every API should be this friendly. I got through the remaining problems fairly quickly because of this.

The code sample passes the property ID as 'property/nnnnnnn' but the API is expecting 'properties/nnnnnnn'.

I'd been using a ServiceAccountCredential created from a .p12 file for GA3. This doesn't seem to be supported for BetaAnalyticsDataClient but I was able to generate a new credential with a .json serialization of the credentials and passing this to BetaAnalyticsDataClient worked fine. I had a permission denied error, this was because I hadn't added the service account email address to the property and doing so got me some data.

The client library is pretty classy (as in too many classes). Creating a filter to exclude internal users involves four nested classes - a FilterExpression that has another FilterExpression for a not condition and then this needs a Filter and the Filter needs a StringFilter. Tedious. And including enums for metrics and dimensions is too much trouble so adding those now requires Metric and Dimension classes but these are just initialized with a string. The list is here.

Lastly when it comes to running the thing the site won't start and says:

"CS0012: The type 'System.Object' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'netstandard, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51'."

Presumably due to some NuGet horror or other. Adding that reference indeed fixes the problem and hopefully doesn't create a new one.

I am now technically if not emotionally prepared for GA3 to be switched off.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Migrating a C# Integration from GA3 to GA4 #code #ga4 #ithcwy #c# Some tips on avoiding pitfalls when migrating a C# application from Google Analytics 3 to Google Analytics 4. )

Comments

Robert Ellison

Hi Tomislav, here's a simple example to get total users for the past month:

Tomislav Valent

Can you give an example of this?

"I'd been using a ServiceAccountCredential created from a .p12 file for GA3. This doesn't seem to be supported for BetaAnalyticsDataClient but I was able to generate a new credential with a .json serialization of the credentials and passing this to BetaAnalyticsDataClient worked fine. I had a permission denied error, this was because I hadn't added the service account email address to the property and doing so got me some data."

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