Why Looker Studio cannot connect to your GA4 data set

James Standen GA4, Google Data Studio, Looker Studio

Starting on November 7th, 2022, Looker Studio users of the GA4 connector have been seeing various error messages. The errors include “Looker Studio cannot connect to your data set”, “Data Set Configuration Error”. Another is “Failed to fetch data from the underlying data set”. Read more about our GA4 BigQuery connector The reason is that Google has turned on quota …

Google Analytics adds demographic data and minute level resolution to Core Reporting API

James Standen Google Analytics API Leave a Comment

Google announced some new dimensions recently, and thanks to the Google Analytics meta data API support in Analytics Canvas they were available immediately to all Analytics Canvas users. One of the interesting developments is an increase in the time resolution from hour to minute. This opens up all sorts of time of day analysis to sites using Google Analytics. It …

Google Analytics isMobile and isTablet have left the building

James Standen Google Analytics API, Google Analytics Data

Google has announced a very important change is coming to your Google Analytics data- if you track device types using isMobile and isTablet dimensions they have been eliminated. But don’t worry, you’ll still be able to understand what devices are being used by using the new deviceCategory dimension, and you have at least 6 months as per the Google Analytics …

Understanding Google Analytics Sampling- Sample Size and Sample Space

James Standen Avoiding sampling, Under the Hood Leave a Comment

Understanding Google Analytics Sampling, Sample Size and Sample Space Nobody likes sampled data if they can have the exact data. Using Analytics Canvas, in the vast majority of cases you can eliminate sampling from Google Analytics. The Google Analytics core reporting API has some new features in the area of sampling that will let Analytics Canvas users understand exactly how …

How to eliminate sampling by using the Google Analytics API

James Standen Analytics Canvas Tool, Avoiding sampling, Google Analytics Premium 1 Comment

Sampling can drastically reduce the accuracy of data queried from Google Analytics, but by using the API in many cases it can be eliminated. Google Analytics is clearly an enterprise capable analytics platform. As higher and higher traffic websites take advantage of its features, Google has put in place some limits on how much data can be included in a …

How to get more than 10 metrics from the Google Analytics API

James Standen Analytics Canvas Tool 4 Comments

While the best queries might not have lots of data, but have the RIGHT data, sometimes you do have a reporting need that means you want to get a lot of different metrics from Google Analytics all at once. Because Goal completions are tracked as metrics, this is often the case- if you are tracking 10 goals, for example, you …

Google Analytics sampling data

James Standen Analytics Canvas Tool, Avoiding sampling, Google Analytics API Leave a Comment

Google Analytics is being used by some very large websites. The result is that there is a lot of data, and one of the realities of tracking a high traffic website with Google Analytics is that often data will be returned as a statistical sample, rather than exact metrics. Ask for too much data and you will get an estimate. …