How to Connect Google Analytics to LLaMA
Thinking you can use a powerful language model like Llama to analyze your Google Analytics data is a great idea. Instead of navigating dozens of pre-built reports, you could just ask questions in plain English and get immediate answers. This article explains how you can do exactly that. We’ll walk through the process of getting information out of Google Analytics and into Llama for analysis, while also being upfront about the pros and cons of this manual approach.
Why Analyze Google Analytics Data with an LLM?
The standard Google Analytics 4 interface is powerful, but it can also feel restrictive. You're mostly limited to the reports and visualizations that Google has already built for you. While custom explorations are possible, they often require a deeper understanding of dimensions, metrics, and report building that many users simply don't have the time to learn.
Using a Large Language Model (LLM) like Llama opens up a more conversational way to find insights. You can move beyond static dashboards and ask specific, follow-up questions like:
"Which five blog posts contributed the most new users last quarter?"
"What's the average session duration for traffic coming from Google Organic vs. Facebook?"
"Show me a breakdown of conversions by country for our summer sale campaign."
This approach promises a future where you can have a direct conversation with your data, getting custom answers without needing to become a GA4 expert or learn a complex business intelligence tool.
The Core Challenge: There's No Direct "Connect" Button
Before we go further, it's important to set the right expectation: currently, there is no native, one-click way to "connect" Google Analytics directly to a standalone Llama model. You can't simply grant it access to your GA4 account and start asking questions about your live data.
The entire process relies on a manual workaround: you must first export your data from Google Analytics and then provide that exported file to Llama for analysis. This workflow looks like this:
_ GA4 Report → Export to CSV → Manual Cleanup → Upload → Prompt Llama_
This process works for one-off analyses, but as we'll see, it has some significant limitations. For now, let’s focus on how to get it done.
How to Analyze GA4 Data with Llama: A Step-by-Step Guide
Follow these steps to export the right data from Google Analytics, prepare it, and use Llama to pull meaningful insights from it.
Step 1: Choose and Export the Right Report
Your analysis will only be as good as the data you export. Start by thinking about the question you want to answer, and navigate to the GA4 report that contains the necessary dimensions and metrics.
Access Your GA4 Property: Log in to Google Analytics and navigate to the property you want to analyze.
Select a relevant report: In the left-hand navigation, go to Reports.
For traffic sources, go to Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
For content performance, go to Engagement → Pages and screens.
For user demographics, go to User → User attributes → Demographics details.
Customize the report:
Set the Date Range: In the top-right corner, select a meaningful date range for your analysis (e.g., Last 30 days, Last quarter).
Add a Secondary Dimension: For richer context, click the blue "+" icon next to the primary dimension column. For example, in the "Pages and screens" report, you could add "Session source / medium" to see which channels are driving traffic to specific pages.
Increase Rows per Page: By default, GA4 shows only 10 rows. At the bottom-right of the table, change the "Rows per page" dropdown to a higher number (like 5000) to ensure you export a comprehensive dataset.
Export to CSV: In the top-right corner of the report, click the "Share this report" icon (an arrow pointing up out of a box) and then select "Download File" and choose "Download CSV."
You now have a raw data file, but it’s not ready for an AI just yet.
Step 2: Clean Up Your CSV File for Llama
GA4 exports come with extra formatting that can easily confuse an LLM. Opening your CSV file in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and cleaning it up is a non-negotiable step.
Remove Extra Header Rows: A GA4 CSV export includes several rows at the top with the property name, date range, and other metadata which aren't part of the actual data. Delete these rows so that the very first row contains your column headers.
Delete Summary Information: The file may also include a blank row and a final totals row at the bottom. Delete these as well. The LLM should only see the headers and the corresponding data rows.
Simplify Column Headers: Rename the column headers to be simple, descriptive, and free of spaces or special characters. For example, change "Session source / medium" to "Source_Medium" and "Engaged sessions" to "Engaged_Sessions". This makes it much easier to reference them in your prompts.
Check Data Formatting: Ensure that numerical columns (like Sessions, Users, Conversions) are formatted as numbers, not text.
Step 3: Choose Your Llama Environment
Unlike ChatGPT, "Llama" isn't a single website you can visit. It’s an open-source model you can access in a few different ways. If you're a developer, you might be running it locally on your machine with a tool like Ollama. For most marketers and business users, the easiest way is to use a third-party platform that has integrated it. Services like Perplexity, Poe, or Replicate often give you access to various Llama models where you can upload a file.
Regardless of the platform, the basic interaction will be the same: a chat interface where you can upload your cleaned CSV file and start asking questions.
Step 4: Crafting Effective Prompts for Analysis
This is where the magic happens. The quality of your prompts will directly determine the quality of the analysis. You can’t just upload a file and say "tell me what's interesting." You need to provide clear instructions and context.
Start with a high-level context prompt:
First, set the stage for the AI. Tell it what its role is and what data it's looking at.
Ask specific, actionable questions:
Once you've given it context, you can start asking your actual questions. Be as specific as possible.
Good Prompt Example #1:
Good Prompt Example #2:
When you have a column like "Source_Medium," you can ask questions to compare channels:
Always double-check the answers. LLMs are incredibly powerful, but they can still make calculation errors or misinterpret a vague query. Use the analysis as a starting point, not as an inarguable fact.
The Reality of This Method: Key Limitations to Consider
While this manual method can deliver some quick insights, it quickly breaks down when you need to perform analysis regularly. It comes with several significant disadvantages:
The Data is Instantly Stale: Your analysis is frozen in time at the moment you clicked "export." Your insights are always based on past performance, and you have no visibility into what is happening right now.
It's Incredibly Repetitive: Suppose you want to check that same report every week. You have to repeat the entire process - export, clean, upload, re-prompt - every single time. The familiar Monday morning scramble to pull reports for a Tuesday meeting is a perfect example of this manual time-sink.
AI Lacks Essential Internal Context: A language model has no underlying understanding of how different Google Analytics metrics relate to each other. It doesn’t inherently know that "Sessions" and "Users" are related but different, or that a high "Bounce Rate" (in old GA) is generally a bad sign. All the context has to be provided by you, in your prompt.
Analysis Across Different Datasets Is Painful: What if you want to compare Google Analytics traffic data to your Facebook Ads spending? With this method, you'd have to export one CSV from GA, another from Facebook, manually merge them in a spreadsheet while trying to align dates and campaign names, and then hope you can craft a prompt complex enough for Llama to understand it all. It’s brittle and prone to error.
Final Thoughts
You can certainly use Llama to analyze exported data from Google Analytics. It takes a manual process of exporting, cleaning, and carefully prompting, but it can help you answer specific questions without needing deep GA4 expertise. For occasional, high-level analysis, it's a useful technique to have in your toolkit, but it's not a scalable or efficient solution for ongoing reporting.
That frustrating cycle of downloading CSVs and stitching them together is the exact problem we were determined to fix. With Graphed , you connect your Google Analytics account directly in a few clicks, eliminating manual exports entirely. We let you ask questions about your data in natural language - like "compare traffic from Google versus Facebook last week" - and instantly build real-time, interactive dashboards. Our AI already understands the structure of marketing and sales data, so you get accurate answers right away, without the fragile prompting and static reports.