GA4 keeps visitor history for two months unless you change one setting

Every Google Analytics 4 property starts life with a setting most people never open. It decides how long GA4 keeps the detailed, event-level and user-level data behind your reports, and on a new property it is set to two months.

That sounds like a technicality until the day you want to compare this spring with last spring, follow a group of customers over a year, or build a funnel over a long period — and find there is nothing to compare with.

The setting is not backdated. Raising it today keeps more history from today on; data GA4 has already deleted is gone. So the best day to change it was the day the property was created, and the second best is today.

What the setting actually affects

GA4 keeps two kinds of data, and the retention setting applies to only one of them.

• Standard reports are not affected. The summarised reports under Reports — acquisition, engagement, pages, conversions over time — are aggregated, and GA4 keeps those regardless. This is why many people never notice the setting: their everyday reports look fine.
• Explorations are affected. Free-form explorations, funnel explorations, path explorations, cohort explorations and user lifetime all read the detailed data. Ask one of them about a period older than your retention and it comes back empty or partial.
• Anything that follows people over time is affected. Questions like “what did customers who first arrived in January spend by June?” need user-level history. With two months of it, you cannot answer them.
• Your BigQuery export is not affected. If you export GA4 to BigQuery, the exported tables are yours and stay as long as you keep them in BigQuery. The retention setting governs data inside GA4 only.

How to change it

You need the Editor role (or higher) on the property.

1. In Google Analytics, open Admin (the gear icon, bottom left).
2. In the Property settings, open Data collection and modification → Data retention. (In older layouts this was under Data settings.)
3. You will see two settings: Event data retention and User data retention. Set both to the longest period offered. On a standard GA4 property that is 14 months; GA4 360 properties can keep data for longer.
4. Leave Reset user data on new activity switched on, so a returning visitor's history keeps counting from their latest visit.
5. Press Save.

That is the whole change. It takes effect from now on, and nothing you already have is touched — lengthening the period never deletes anything.

Why it is two months in the first place

Google sets the short default for privacy: the less user-level data a property keeps, the less there is to protect. That is a reasonable choice for a default, and some organisations choose to keep it on purpose. If your privacy policy or your clients' contracts say how long you keep analytics data, check that before you change it. For most businesses, though, the default is simply something nobody decided, and fourteen months is the useful setting: it covers a full year plus a little, which is what year-on-year comparisons need.

If you look after several properties

The setting is per property, so an agency or a business with several sites has to check each one. It is quick to forget on a property someone else created, and you only find out months later, when the report you need comes back empty.

This is one of the things we check for you in Glancely. When you connect a GA4 property, Glancely reads its retention setting and, if it is shorter than fourteen months, says so on the Data sources page with the steps to change it, rather than leaving you to discover it a year from now. The reports in Glancely that follow customers over time, like acquisition cohorts, depend on it.