Google Analytics

Google Analytics lets you analyze data about customer engagement with your website or application.

Google Analytics only allows us to connect to the reporting layer of their API, so we can't access all the raw data like we can for many of our other connectors. Instead, Google requires that it must be queried via a pre-defined report. Each time you go through the setup form, you'll be creating at least one new report.

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Features

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Setup guide

Follow our step-by-step Google Analytics setup guide to connect Google Analytics with your destination using Fivetran connectors.

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Sync overview

In our Google Analytics connector we use a trailing window instead of a rollback sync. During every sync cycle we sync data from the last 3 days. Once a day, we also sync data of last 7th, 15th and 30th day to get conversion-related data. This helps us to fetch all of your important data using fewer API calls.

When you sync Google Analytics with Fivetran, the following three features affect the nature of your connector:

Sampling

Users who aren't on the Google Analytics 360 tier of Google Analytics get sampled data when their reporting query exceeds Google's pre-defined compute threshold. The query's computational load is driven by both the volume of data that needs to be queried and by the complexity of the aggregations. Fivetran minimizes sampling by querying for data in single-day increments. You can find more information on sampling in Google Analytics' documentation.

Google Analytics 360 users may also get sampled data, however, they can have all the raw row-level data loaded into their Google Cloud Storage, which we also sync with your warehouse.

Segments

A segment is a subset of your analytics data. For example, of your entire set of users, one segment might be users from a particular country or city. Another segment might be users who purchase a particular line of products or who visit a specific part of your site. Some dimensions and metrics reports cannot be queried together, and in this case our setup form will display an error. You can find more information about choosing dimensions that don't clash in our setup instructions.

Filter

The filter query string parameter restricts the data returned from your request. To use the filters parameter, supply a dimension or metric on which to filter, followed by the filter expression. For example, ga:country==United States&ga:browser==Firefox, given query request will return data for only for the country United State and browser Firefox. The filter expression should contain only those dimensions and/or metrics which you have chosen in your setup form.

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Schema information

We provide the following types of reports:

• Prebuilt Report
• Custom Report

Fivetran will deliver tables with the date, profile, and unique_id fields for either kind of report. A Prebuilt Report syncs a pre-defined set of fields. See the full list of our Prebuilt Reports. For a Custom Report, you can add up to six additional dimension fields and ten additional metric fields.

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Updating data

Because the Google Analytics data is delivered in a cube, changing the way that the cube is formatted is difficult; adding in (or removing) fields changes the way the data is aggregated and synced. This would require that we alter the data in your existing warehouse to ensure consistency.

To ensure that the data you're receiving is reliable, we require that you create an entirely new connector for the updated version of your Google Analytics report. You must either:

• Name this new/modified report something different than the previous version. Or
• Keep the name of the new/modified report and sync it into a different schema.

NOTE: Google Analytics delivers optimal performance in the context of intraday data refreshes. You can find the details documented here.