How to Access Old Google Analytics Data

With Google officially shutting down Universal Analytics (UA), years of valuable website performance data can feel like it vanished into thin air. Fret not - your historical data isn't gone just yet, but the clock is ticking. This guide will walk you through exactly how to access and save your old Universal Analytics data before Google permanently deletes it.

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Why Your Old Google Analytics Data Still Matters

Before jumping into the "how," it's worth remembering "why" this is so important. Your historical UA data is a roadmap of your business's online journey. It contains invaluable insights for:

• Year-over-Year Comparisons: How does this year's Black Friday campaign compare to the last three? Without historical data, seasonal and annual benchmarking becomes guesswork.
• Long-Term Trend Analysis: Identifying gradual shifts in user behavior, traffic sources, or content popularity is only possible when you can zoom out and look at several years of data. Did organic search traffic slowly climb after a site redesign? UA has the answer.
• Content Performance History: That cornerstone blog post from 2018 might still be driving traffic and conversions. UA data allows you to prove the long-term ROI of your content marketing efforts.

Google stopped processing new data in UA properties on July 1, 2023. While read-only access to the interface is still available for a limited time, Google has stated it will begin shutting down all access, meaning the data will be deleted permanently. The time to save your data is now.

First, Check If You Can Still Access the UA Interface

Before you panic, it's possible you can still log in and view your historical reports directly. Google's shutdown is happening in phases, and many users still have read-only access. This is your window of opportunity to export what you need.

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Here’s how to quickly check:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account.
2. In the top-left corner, click on the account/property selector dropdown.
3. You'll likely see properties for Google Analytics 4 with just a numerical ID (e.g., "123456789"). Look for your older property, which will have a "UA-" prefix in its ID (e.g., "UA-98765432-1").
4. Select the UA property you want to access.

If you can load the property, you're in! You’ll see a prominent banner at the top of the screen reminding you that the property is no longer collecting data. All reporting features are now read-only, but you can navigate through your old reports to find the data you want to save. Treat this as a temporary library - checked-out books must be returned, and this access won't last forever.

Method 1: The Manual Export to Sheets or Excel

This is the most direct, straightforward, and labor-intensive method. Think of it as manually packing your house one box at a time. It’s free and requires no special tools, but it will take time, especially if you have years of rich data to preserve.

The typical pre-automation reporting workflow often looked like this: download CSVs on Monday, spend hours wrangling the data in a spreadsheet for a Tuesday meeting, then answer follow-up questions for the rest of an afternoon. Manually exporting from UA is a similar process – effective but punishingly slow.

Step-by-Step Guide to Manual Exporting:

1. Navigate to the specific report you want to save. For example, let's say you want to save your top-performing pages. You’d go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
2. Set the date range in the top-right corner. This is the most crucial step. You might want to export data in yearly, quarterly, or monthly chunks. For a very long time-series, selecting "All Time" might get your data sampled (meaning GA uses a smaller subset of data to estimate the total), so shorter increments are often better.
3. Increase the number of rows shown. By default, GA tables only show 10 rows. At the bottom of the table, use the "Show rows" dropdown to select a higher number, like 5000, to get as much data as possible in one go.
4. Click the "Export" button, located just below the date range selector in the top-right.
5. Choose your preferred format: Google Sheets, Excel (XLSX), or CSV. For most uses, Google Sheets or Excel is best, as they preserve the formatting and are ready for analysis.

You must repeat this entire process for every single report you want to save. This includes audience demographics, acquisition channels, conversion goals, e-commerce transactions, and so on. It's a true test of patience.

Pros of Manual Export:

• Completely free.
• You have total control over which specific reports and date ranges you pull.
• It's easy to do for one or two quick reports.

Cons of Manual Export:

• Extremely time-consuming and tedious on any significant scale.
• Prone to human error (e.g., forgetting a report, selecting the wrong date range).
• Data becomes static the moment it's exported and loses context without careful reassembly.
• Combining data from different exported files to get a complete picture is a challenging task that often requires some technical knowledge to accomplish.

Method 2: The Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on

If manual exporting is packing boxes one by one, using the official Google Analytics Add-on for Google Sheets is like using a dolly. It’s a slightly more advanced method that lets you pull UA data directly into a spreadsheet with much more automation and customization.

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Getting Your Add-on Set Up:

1. Open a brand new Google Sheet.
2. In the menu, go to Extensions > Add-ons > Get add-ons.
3. Search for "Google Analytics" and install the official add-on from Google.
4. Follow the prompts to grant the necessary account permissions.

Creating and Running a Report:

1. Once installed, navigate to Extensions > Google Analytics > Create a new report.
2. A configuration sidebar will appear. Give your report a name, then select the correct Analytics Account, Property, and View (your old UA view).
3. Under "Configure report options," you'll define what data to pull. This is where the power lies. You use specific names for Metrics (the numbers, like sessions or conversions - e.g., ga:sessions) and Dimensions (the categories, like traffic source or country - e.g., ga:country).
4. For example, to pull daily sessions by device for the last year, you'd use Metrics like ga:sessions and Dimensions like ga:date and ga:deviceCategory.
5. Click the "Create Report" button. This won't run it yet, but it will create a new sheet in your document titled "Report Configuration." You can tweak the parameters from this screen more specifically if you like.
6. To run it, go back to Extensions > Google Analytics and select "Run reports."

The beauty of this method is that once your report configurations are set up properly, you can easily rerun them any time, or even schedule them to get a fresh pull by going to Extensions > Google Analytics and "Schedule Reports."

Pros of the Add-on:

• Much more scalable and faster than manual exports for large amounts of data.
• You can pull custom combinations of metrics and dimensions that aren't available in standard UA reports.
• You can schedule reports to run automatically until UA access is cut off.

Cons of the Add-on:

• There's a learning curve, you need to understand GA metrics and dimensions terminology.
• Setting up reports can still be time-consuming at first.
• The data still lives in a spreadsheet, so you need skills like pivot tables to visualize and analyze it effectively.

Method 3: Connect to a Business Intelligence Tool

This is the most robust and future-proof approach to preserving your historical data but with one big caveat. The aim is to transfer your UA data out of Analytics and into a separate location like a dedicated BI tool or data warehouse, where it is your property. While Google’s own data warehouse solution – BigQuery – is the ideal data store, simpler tools like Looker Studio are easily and freely able to start this process.

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Using Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio)

Looker Studio allows you to build live dashboards using your Analytics data. As access dies, so does that liveliness. However, it's a great tool to visually explore your historic data before it disappears and extract some insights before it does.

1. Just open Looker Studio, click Create in the top left, and hit Blank Report.
2. Connect your datasource to the desired UA property in the presented popup after selecting the "Google Analytics" connector source.
3. Build out interesting visuals of your past content, trends, or user behaviors!

The key here is that any charts or graphics you build are live but fragile. When Google finally deletes the underlying UA data, your beautiful Looker Studio dashboards will break. The real power move is to use this setup to understand what data is most valuable so you know exactly what to extract using the Spreadsheet Add-On method before it's too late.

Final Thoughts

Saving your Universal Analytics data is a critical task for maintaining a complete view of your business's history over time. From quick manual exports for essential reports to more sophisticated methods using the Google Sheets Add-on, you have excellent options to preserve your insights. But the one constant is urgency - act now to grab this data before the window to access it is shut for good.

Breaking free from the cumbersome cycle of downloading static reports and manually wrangling data is why we built our platform. Once gone, your historic UA data can be hard to use in isolation. So why not make it easy after starting your historical clean-slate to work with your current data using a simpler, more efficient approach. With Graphed you simply connect your live marketing and sales platforms (like GA4, Shopify, or HubSpot) and use natural language to ask questions and build dashboards. Instead of clicking the 'Export' button, users in Graphed can just type "Compare my organic traffic versus an ad campaign traffic this quarter," getting both beautiful, but also live-updating charts and visualizations immediately.