Heads Up - Google Analytics is now Deleting Historical Data (Unless You Tell It Not To)

[Ryuzaki]

I'm sure you all saw the emails that went out about setting your data retention time periods for Google Analytics.

I thought I had set mine but apparently I dismissed the notice and forgot about it. So now I've lost about half or so of analytics for my main project.

This is a public service announcement: go check yours!

Here is how it's done:

You need to click Admin (the gear if you don't have your sidebar expanded) at the bottom of the left side menu. Then you'll see your Account > Properties > Something Else. But under Properties you need to click Tracking Info, and when the sub-menu expands click Data Retention.

From there you need to set that dropdown for "User and event data retention" to Don't automatically expire.

Mine was set on 26 months, which is just over 2 years. I think this went in effect May 25th, 2018. So if your projects are older than 26 months, you've already lost a good chunk of yours too.

Go check!

 

[ryandiscord]

But now you're GDPR compliant bro!

What exactly did you lose? They mentioned that it "shouldn't" impact most reports except advanced custom reports and segments. I work on a site that needs to be GDPR compliant and we have our data set for 38 months and I have been dreading what will happen to the data.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I lost everything from April 24, 2016 and before.

This is both on the All Website Data view and the view I have that includes filters from ghost hosts spam and other fake referral traffic. That lines up perfectly with June 24, 2018 (yesterday).

26 months to be exact, which is what my drop box was set to.

 

[ryandiscord]

I forgot it's a rolling 38 months so I've already been impacted. I just looked in my GA account beyond 38 months and I have lost all event data beyond that and ALL segment data. If you were using events as goals, that is gone.

Non segmented ecommerce revenue and transactions are still reported. Transaction ID is gone.

Users are gone but you should still have session data.