GA4 Data Retention: How to Extend It to 14 Months
Google Analytics lets you change how long it keeps user-level and event-level data, meaning data tied to cookies, advertising identifiers or user IDs. The retention setting does not affect most standard reports, which are built on aggregated data; it does affect Explorations, which are where you actually dig into user behavior.
Google Signals data is kept for 26 months or for the retention period you set, whichever is shorter.
How to extend user and event data retention in GA4
1. Open your Google Analytics property and go to Admin in the left-hand menu.
2. In the Property column, go to Data Settings → Data Retention.
3. Choose the retention period for user and event data in the Event data retention setting. Standard GA4 properties can pick 2 or 14 months.
4. Turn on Reset user data on new activity.
5. Click Save.
The change takes effect after roughly 24 hours.
The default two months is not enough to compare year over year or to evaluate seasonality. Change the setting right away, because data from before the change cannot be recovered. GA4 has several default settings like this that are worth fixing, and we collect all of them in a marketing audit.
