Google Analytics Data Retention policy - which reports does it limit?

Have you mapped out a data plan for 2023 yet? If you’re selling on a major DTC platform like Shopify or BigCommerce, GA4 is probably on your mind. With the sunsetting of Universal Analytics (GA3 or the “old version” of Google Analytics) on the horizon, it’s time to get going with event-based tracking. Many brands have been procrastinating about setting up GA4 – or, worse, only setting it up halfway so that browsing behavior is tracked but revenue and conversions are missing. But can you blame them? Shopify isn’t planning to release native GA4 integration until March 2023 at the earliest (and nobody’s expecting it to work well for serious DTC brands) BigCommerce released a beta version of their GA4 integration in November, but it’s extremely minimal, tracking only begin_checkout and purchase events Manual setup is costly and confusing (and has to be maintained every time you change your site or checkout flow) GA4 revenue tracking should be your top priority, but there’s a lot of confusion around GA4, made worse by Shopify apps that claim to offer GA4 integration but only offer client-side tracking. It shouldn’t be so complicated. At Littledata we’ve already fixed GA4 tracking for hundreds of top DTC brands. In this post I’ll show you how to check if you’ve set up GA4 correctly to capture orders and revenue, and how to start tracking ecommerce conversions today in the most secure and reliable way possible. Follow this guide to GA4 and you’ll be on your way to ecommerce data tracking in no time. We’ll look at how to get from this: To this: How to check if you’re tracking GA4 revenue and conversions After creating a new GA4 property and following the setup assistant to create a new data stream, you might have noticed that you’re instructed to copy and paste the Google tag (gtag.js) script on every page of your ecommerce site. Once you’ve added the Google tag to your site and linked your GA4 property, everything will just start tracking automatically, right? Wrong. With the basic script all you get are engagement events such as page_view, session_start, view_search_result, and click. Obviously these “automatic events” are super important, but they don’t tell you what happens post-click. Here’s how to check if your GA4 ecommerce setup is working or not. 1. Check your Acquisition reporting in GA4 There are two places to look to see if you’re capturing ecommerce conversions. First, the Acquisition reports. You’ll see user and traffic engagement details grouped by channel, but no conversion or revenue data exists. You’re seeing which organic or paid channels are bringing visitors to your store, but you can’t tell if you’re generating any revenue from these visitors. GA4 revenue reporting not showing is one of the most asked questions by merchants and performance marketers. 2. Check your Engagement and Monetization reporting in GA4Taking a step further, check your Engagement and Monetization reports. Do you see GA4 reporting data about cart updates, interactions with the checkout flow, or any purchase or revenue data? If revenue is missing in GA4’s monetization overview, you need to start tracking ecommerce activity ASAP. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a lot of data points that lead nowhere and you will not have an accurate understanding of your ecommerce store’s performance.  [tip] Use our complementary instant order checker for GA4 to check your property [/tip] How to track ecommerce conversions and revenue in GA4 After landing on your store, online shoppers interact with collections and products before adding items to their carts and going through the checkout process. These web interactions must be captured as events and linked with customers and marketing data in GA4 to get a complete picture of your business. We have looked at what data can be missing from your GA4 events and which enhanced ecommerce events you should track. But how can you get all these ecommerce events in GA4?  Google Tag Manager (GTM) has always been the most common tracking method for Universal Analytics, and the setup process can be carried over to GA4. However, for a lean team, the setup process can be quite time-consuming and complex, having to create a Data Layer In Shopify, and then for each event, you must create: Firing Triggers in GTM  Data Layer Variables in GTM Ecommerce Tags in GTM Needless to say, there are quite a few maintenance pitfalls if you're going down this route. Setup is just the beginning. To make matters worse, Shopify is removing GTM from the checkout for Shopify Plus stores (standard Shopify stores never had access). So even if you take the time to add all your own events to tracking visitors before they make a purchase, you’ll no longer be able to track checkout steps (add-to-cart, etc) with GTM. If you want to save time and money while still having confidence in the accuracy of your GA4 data, Littledata is the perfect solution for you. Our proven app is used by over 1500+ brands and can help you track your ecommerce conversions with ease, giving you the reliable data you need to make informed decisions about your business. Littledata’s data layer uses a unique combination of client-side and server-side tracking to ensure accurate, complete ecommerce data in GA4 and any connected data warehouse or reporting destination. Littledata captures complete ecommerce data automatically in GA4 for Shopify and BigCommerce stores. We can break down those events into seven general categories: Marketing channels Browsing behavior Checkout steps Conversions Revenue Recurring orders Upsells Of course, each reporting category has useful data, but brands that really want to scale link it all together to look at revenue and LTV by channel, splitting out first-time purchases from repeat purchases or recurring orders (subscription analytics). As I mentioned earlier, Acquisition reports are some of the most valuable sets of data GA4 offers. They show which of your team’s marketing efforts bring the most results, from traffic through engagement and conversions. The difference between having accurate or questionable ROI data in these reports rests on how the purchase event is tracked. It is useful to have the engagement metrics grouped by channel, but the difference between having accurate or questionable ROI data in these reports rests on how the purchase event is tracked.  Get started with Littledata today so you will have the data you need to scale faster the smart way. We recommend tracking in UA and GA4 “in parallel” as soon as possible.

Many brands with large customer bases are facing a similar question when it comes to storing data—is it time to bring all data processing in-house? Whether this is prompted by a data security audit, a data breach, or a desire to be more agile with data analysis, it's an important question that thankfully doesn't have a complicated answer. In this article, I’ll explore whether you should outsource or insource customer data processing for your brand. Quick side note—for Littledata’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, customer data is usually first-party data captured as part of the ecommerce checkout process, including post-purchase interactions with the customers and web browsing information such as IP addresses. Why you need first-party data to be secure First-party customer data is data the customer shares with you directly through the server connecting them to your website. By its very nature, first-party data is created by a contract—and more importantly, a bond of trust—between your brand and the end customer. Accidentally leaking that data is brand-damaging: 46% of organizations surveyed by Forbes suffered reputational damage after a data breach. In addition, GDPR and similar regulations impose large fines (up to 4% of global revenue) for data breaches—specifically, lax processes leading to a data breach. You might also be concerned about commercial espionage—how valuable could your customer purchase history be in the hands of a competitor or a fraudster? Or maybe your company has been burned by third-party data processors in the past whose security standards did not meet your own. Taking these concerns together, you may be thinking the only way to be truly data secure is to process and store first-party customer data on your own infrastructure. But there are downsides to this. Do you want to own your own data infrastructure? By data infrastructure, I don’t mean owning bare-metal servers that sit in the broom cupboard behind your office. I’ll assume you are comfortable with the concept of hosting data in a public or private cloud environment. However, even maintaining that cloud computing infrastructure brings costs and risks. Your company will be responsible for software patches, updates to use the latest API versions, monitoring for suspicious activity, and handling outages. Data engineering is complex, and great data engineers are in short supply. So, I suggest you are better off licensing a secure data pipeline than building it all yourself. Does your company control the data end-to-end? Frankly, processing company data in-house may be missing the point if you do not control the data processing end-to-end. Many of Littledata’s customers have made a deliberate choice by working with Shopify or BigCommerce to leave purchase and transaction processing to a cloud provider—signing data processing agreements (see DPAs for Shopify and BigCommerce) to store customer data on US cloud servers. Many brands also make a choice to share customer data with Google (pseudo-anonymized) or with Facebook (not anonymized) to improve their customer acquisition and Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS). In effect, these brands are outsourcing the data processing that happens between the ecommerce cloud and the marketing cloud to Littledata. Trying to do this processing in-house makes little sense when the start and end of the data processing chain are third parties. Does EU customer data need to stay in the EU to be secure? You may have read about regional courts in France and Austria ruling against sending EU customer data to Google Analytics—or indeed sending data to any US server. I think these rulings are extreme and will eventually be struck down. There is no practical or legal reason why data processing on servers within the EU is somehow more GDPR compliant than hosting on the cloud in the US. That said, data nationalism as a trend is here to stay, so there may be a future need to keep EU data siloed. All cloud computing networks have EU servers, and tools like Segment make it possible to split EU customer data processing onto EU servers. The limitation is that right now, none of our other partners (especially Shopify, Google, and Facebook) have the same ability to process in the EU. This makes regionalizing only one part of the data processing chain pointless. Is outsourced data GDPR compliant? Yes, you can subcontract data processing to a third party. But to be GDPR compliant, your data processors need to enable the right to rectification, the right to erasure, and the right to restrict processing. All the main partners that Littledata works with (Shopify, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, etc.) have API endpoints by which your customer can request their data to be updated or erased, and this request can be passed on to the downstream processors. If the customer requests to restrict processing (e.g. opting out of advertising retargeting using a cookie consent banner) your company needs to also pass along that choice to the downstream processors. Littledata’s tracking script makes that easy to do via integration with Shopify’s consent management, and plugins for OneTrust and TrustArc. Can you control outsourced data processing? Yes. Doing so is just a matter of working with a processing partner that a) is transparent on how they process the data, b) follows good practices in data security, and c) provides Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the processing. At Littledata, we are clear about how we process customer data (and exactly what data points are stored where), have a public data security policy, and provide tight processing SLAs for Plus customers. [tip]Learn more about how Littledata protects your data while giving you 100% accurate analytics by booking a demo with one of our experts.[/tip] Conclusion I believe you can outsource data processing and still be truly data secure. In fact, I believe trying to bring data fully in-house is costly and pointless for most cloud ecommerce brands. Pick trusted partners to ensure your customer data processing is both super reliable and super secure, and get on with scaling your business!