What is Data Retention in Google Analytics 4?

You’ve spent hours building the perfect ad-hoc report in Google Analytics 4’s Explore section, only to come back later and find the data for your date range is gone. Frustrating, right? This vanishing data is a common headache, and it’s almost always caused by a single, often overlooked setting: data retention. This article will explain exactly what GA4’s data retention policy is, why it's crippling your reports, and how to fix it in under two minutes.

What Exactly Is Data Retention in Google Analytics 4?

Data retention is the period of time Google Analytics stores your user-level and event-level data before it's automatically deleted. Think of it as an expiration date for the granular, raw data associated with individual users. Once this period passes, that detailed data is gone for good.

For anyone coming from Universal Analytics, this behavior can be a shock. In the old system, you could generally set your data to "Do not automatically expire," effectively keeping it forever. GA4 takes a different approach, forcing a choice between a 2-month or 14-month retention window for standard properties. Unfortunately, the default is set to two months, a period so short it renders most long-term analysis impossible.

The most important thing to understand is that these retention settings do not apply to the standard, aggregated reports in your GA4 dashboard. They specifically impact the advanced analysis tools that rely on raw, non-aggregated data. We’ll break down exactly what that means in a moment.

Why Your GA4 Data Retention Setting Matters

A two-month retention window might be fine if you only care about last week’s traffic, but for any meaningful analysis, it’s a major limitation. Here’s how it can get in your way:

• No Year-Over-Year Comparisons: Want to compare this holiday season's performance to last year's in an Explore report? With the default 2-month setting, it's impossible. By the time this year's data comes in, last year's detailed data has already been deleted.
• Limited User Journey Analysis: You can't analyze customer funnels or paths that take longer than 60 days. If your sales cycle is three or six months long, you lose the ability to see how users behaved in the early stages of their journey.
• Incomplete Audience Building: The audience builder in GA4 relies on user-level histories. If you want to create a remarketing audience of everyone who visited a specific landing page in the last 90 days, you can’t do it if that data is deleted after 60 days.

Essentially, leaving the setting at its default prevents you from performing the deep-dive historical analysis that GA4's Explore hub was designed for.

User-Level vs. Aggregated Data: What's Actually Affected?

The biggest point of confusion around data retention is what it does and doesn’t affect. Many people worry that all of their historical performance data will disappear. That’s not the case. GA4 stores two types of data, and only one is subject to this deletion schedule.

User-Level and Event-Level Data (Affected)

This is the raw, granular data connected to a unique user ID or a specific event instance. It’s what powers the advanced reports where you can "explore" and segment your data in custom ways. If your report requires GA4 to process un-summarized data logs, it's relying on this data bucket.

Tools that depend on this data include:

• Explorations: All reports you build in the "Explore" section, including Free-form, Funnel exploration, and Path exploration reports.
• Audience Builder: Creating custom audiences for remarketing or analysis.
• User Segmenting: Applying detailed segments based on long-term user behavior in any report.

Aggregated Data (Not Affected)

This is the summarized, pre-calculated data you see in the standard reports. For these reports, Google has already processed the raw data and stored it as daily totals. Think of the charts showing new users, sessions, or conversions in the “Traffic Acquisition” or “Engagement” reports.

Standard aggregated reports in the "Reports" section are safe. The data in these is stored permanently by Google and is not subject to your retention settings. You will always be able to look back years from now and see your total traffic for a specific day in these default reports. The catch is that you can’t drill down into the granular user behavior that made up those totals.

How to Check and Change Your GA4 Data Retention Settings (Step-by-Step)

The good news is that this is an incredibly easy fix. You should check and change this setting for every new GA4 property you create. Changing it will only affect data moving forward, it won't retroactively recover data that has already been deleted.

Follow these quick steps:

1. Navigate to the Admin section by clicking the gear icon in the bottom-left corner of your GA4 dashboard.
2. Go to the "Property" column and select Data Settings > Data Retention.
3. You will likely see the "Event data retention" dropdown set to "2 months." Click this dropdown and change it to 14 months.
4. Ensure that the toggle for "Reset user data on new activity" is turned ON.
5. Click Save.

That's it. It takes less than a minute. Your GA4 property will now hold onto granular data for 14 months, which is sufficient for week-over-week, month-over-month, and year-over-year analysis in your custom Explore reports.

Understanding the “Reset User Data on New Activity” Toggle

You probably noticed the toggle below the main retention setting: "Reset user data on new activity." It's important to understand what this does and why it should almost always be left on.

When this is ON, the 14-month expiration clock for a specific user resets every time they visit your site. For example, if a user visits in January, their 14-month timer starts. If they return in June, the clock restarts from zero. As long as they keep interacting with your site at least once every 14 months, their granular user data will be retained indefinitely.

If you were to turn this OFF, that user's data would be deleted 14 months after their first session, regardless of how often they returned. For almost every business, the goal is to understand loyal customers, so keeping this setting enabled is the best practice.

Choosing Your Retention Period: 2 vs. 14 Months

For a standard GA4 property, the choice is simple. Unless you are bound by strict company privacy mandates or specific regulations like GDPR that require you to purge user data sooner, you should choose 14 months.

Setting it to 14 months doesn't negatively impact site speed, report loading times, or cost you any money. It freely gives you extended access to your own data, enabling far more valuable analysis. The 14-month timeframe is designed to support year-over-year reporting (12 months + a 2-month lookback buffer), which is a foundational practice for analyzing business trends and seasonality.

Beyond the Limits: What to Do When 14 Months Isn't Enough

What if you have a business with a very long sales cycle or need to perform analysis on user cohorts from three years ago? While the native GA4 interface caps you at 14 months, there is a powerful - and free - way to get around this: linking GA4 to Google BigQuery.

BigQuery is a cloud data warehouse that can store your raw, event-level GA4 data indefinitely. You can set up a direct export from GA4 to BigQuery, which effectively creates a permanent backup of all your granular data from the moment you enable it. Once the data is in BigQuery, you can analyze it without limits, but it requires knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language) to query the database.

For growing businesses that want ultimate ownership and access to their historical data, the BigQuery integration is the go-to solution for long-term storage.

Final Thoughts

Data retention is a small setting within GA4's admin panel, but it has a massive impact on your ability to do meaningful custom analysis. By understanding that it only affects the granular data needed for Explorations and switching the default from two months to 14, you immediately unlock critical capabilities like long-term user journey analysis and year-over-year reporting.

Dealing with confusing settings, building manual reports, and getting bogged down in GA4’s complex interface is precisely the kind of busywork we built Graphed to eliminate. Instead of grappling with custom dashboards, you can connect your GA4 account and just ask for what you need in plain English - like, “Show me how many new users came from our email campaign last quarter” or “Create a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs GA4 revenue.” We generate the report for you instantly, bypassing the technical hurdles and getting you right to the insights so you can get back to growing your business.