Discover how to quickly adjust your Google Analytics data retention settings to enhance your data analysis capabilities.
By default, Google Analytics retains data for two months, but this setting can be changed to instead retain up to 14 months’ worth of data.
Extending your data retention period allows you to access a larger dataset, providing deeper insights into user behavior and website performance.
Keep in mind that changing this setting is not retroactive, so make the adjustment as soon as possible to start accumulating more historical data for analysis.
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Video Transcription
0:04
okay so data retention settings is
0:09
the uh how long Google is going to hold
0:13
on to data for use in
0:16
reports um this is is useful just so
0:21
that as you’re drilling down into
0:22
different reports you actually have a
0:23
larger data sets to look at um I believe
0:27
the default is two months and then the
0:31
maximum is is uh believe it’s 14 months
0:35
but I’m going to actually share my
0:37
screen real fast and and walk you
0:39
through
0:41
that to show you where that setting is
0:46
so all right here we
0:50
go so this is the admin screen so if
0:53
you’re in your Google analytics account
0:55
you just click down on admin you’ll be
0:57
shown this new page it’s a newer lay out
1:00
um I’m learning to like it um over on
1:04
this right hand side you’ll see data
1:05
collection and
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modification and then halfway down
1:08
you’ll see data retention so click on
1:11
that and then you see
1:15
here two months this is going to be
1:18
default so if you’ve set up Google
1:21
analytics and you haven’t Chang this
1:25
you’re only retaining two months of
1:27
event retention um
1:30
which isn’t going to give you a lot of
1:33
activity to to rely on you know we kind
1:37
of assume that Google’s done this to
1:40
keep the burden of their servers down so
1:42
like if everyone’s retaining 14 months
1:44
even if they’re not using it then that’s
1:47
just a lot of uh a lot of load on their
1:49
systems so we we go in and we update all
1:54
of our clients to 14 months so we
1:55
actually do have more data to to use
2:00
this is not a
2:02
retroactive so if you’ve had a website
2:05
tracking data for 14 months already and
2:08
yet your data retention has been set at
2:10
two months going and changing it to 14
2:12
months is not going to give you um all
2:16
of your historical data it is going to
2:17
be from when you changed your data
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retention so the sooner you can change
2:23
this the sooner you’ll have availability
2:25
of of uh more data so that’s
2:30
something we want to take care of as
2:32
soon as
2:34
possible