How to Delete a Google Analytics 4 Account
Thinking about deleting a Google Analytics 4 account? It’s a straightforward process, but it’s a move you need to make with your eyes wide open. This guide will walk you through exactly how to delete your GA4 account and, just as importantly, cover the crucial questions you need to ask yourself before you do.
Before You Click Delete: A Quick Checklist
Once you send a GA4 account or property to the trash, there's a short window to recover it before it’s gone forever. Taking a few minutes to prepare can save you from a major data disaster down the road. Go through this checklist first.
1. Confirm You Really Want to Permanently Delete Your Data
This sounds obvious, but it’s the most important step. Deleting a GA4 account is a permanent action. After a 35-day grace period, all historical data associated with that account - and all the properties within it - will be erased from Google's servers. There is no "undo" button after that period ends.
Are you deleting it because it’s a legacy account you no longer need? Or are you simply trying to declutter your view? If it's the latter, consider removing yourself as a user instead of deleting the entire account, which would impact everyone on your team.
2. Back Up and Export Your Historical Data
Just because you’re finished with an account doesn’t mean your historical data is worthless. You might need it years from now for year-over-year comparisons, historical trend analysis, or even during a company audit. You can't just download a single ".GA4" file, so you have a few options for exporting:
Manual Exports: Go into your most important reports (Traffic acquisition, Conversions, Demographics, etc.) and export them as a CSV or Google Sheet. This is manual and time-consuming but effective for saving your most critical metrics.
Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio): Connect your GA4 property to Looker Studio. Create dashboards and tables with your most important historical data. While it won't house all your data, it will preserve the visualizations and core numbers in an accessible format even after the source property is deleted. The charts themselves won’t receive live data, but they will provide you a clear record of your data over time before it disappears.
Google Analytics Reporting API: For developers or technically skilled users, you can use the API to programmatically export data into a Google Sheet or your own database. This is the most comprehensive method for saving raw data.
3. Check for Linked Products and Integrations
Modern marketing stacks are deeply intertwined. Before deleting an account, you must check which other Google products are connected to it. Disconnecting these can have an immediate impact on your campaigns, reporting, and attribution.
Navigate to Admin > Product Links to check for connections to services like:
Google Ads: Your GA4 account might be feeding conversion or audience data directly into your ad campaigns. Deleting it will break this link, disrupting your bidding strategies, conversion tracking, and remarketing lists.
Google Search Console: This links your site's organic search performance to user behavior. You’ll lose that integrated view within GA4.
Google Merchant Center: For e-commerce stores, this link is vital for tracking the performance of shopping campaigns.
Make sure you’ve relinked any active platforms to a different GA4 property before proceeding with deletion.
4. Inform Your Team and Stakeholders
You might be the primary administrator, but others in your company - from fellow marketers to sales leaders and executives - may be relying on that GA4 data or its connected reports. Give your team a heads-up before you remove their access to potentially a few years' worth of historical information. This gives them a chance to back up any reports they personally need and prevents any "what happened to the analytics?" fire drills.
Account vs. Property vs. Data Stream: What Are You Actually Deleting?
The account structure in Google Analytics 4 can be a bit confusing, and it's essential to understand it before you delete anything. Using the wrong level can lead to either deleting far more data than you intended or leaving unwanted items behind.
Think of it like a filing cabinet:
The Account (The Cabinet): This is the highest level of organization. An Account can contain multiple Properties. You typically have one Account for your entire business. Deleting the Account deletes everything inside it.
The Property (A Drawer): The Property is where your website or app's data is collected and processed. You might have one property for your main website, another for your mobile app, and a third for a test environment, all within the same Account. Deleting a Property only removes that specific set of data, leaving the rest of the Account intact.
The Data Stream (A single Folder): A Data Stream is the data source for a property. For example, a single property can have a data stream for your website (yourcompany.com) and another for your iOS app. You generally don't delete data streams directly, you delete the property they feed into.
Many people searching for "how to delete a GA4 account" actually just want to get rid of a single, unused property. Double-check to see if what you really want to do is prune a specific property instead of removing the entire account.
Step-by-Step: How to Move a GA4 Account to the Trash to be Permanently Deleted after 35 Days
If you've gone through the checklist and are certain you want to delete the entire Account (along with all properties inside it), here’s how to do it. You need to have the Administrator or Editor role to perform this action.
Navigate to the Google Analytics home page and click on the Admin gear icon in the bottom-left corner.
In the Account column, ensure you have selected the correct account you wish to delete from the dropdown menu.
Click on Account Settings.
At the very top-right of the Account Settings screen, you will see a button labeled Move to Trash Can. Click on it.
A warning screen will appear, confirming what you are about to do. It will list the account name and remind you about the 35-day deletion period. Read it carefully.
Click the blue Trash account button to confirm.
Your entire account is now in the trash. It will be held there for 35 days, after which it will be permanently deleted.
How to Delete Just a Single GA4 Property
If you concluded that you only need to remove one website's or app's data set and not your whole organization's account, follow these steps instead:
Click on the Admin gear icon in the bottom-left corner of your dashboard.
In the Property column, use the dropdown menu to select the specific property you want to delete.
Click on Property Details.
At the very top-right, right next to the property name, you'll see a button that shows Move to Trash. Click it.
A confirmation screen will appear confirming the details about the data to be deleted. It will explain that the property will be deleted after the 35-day grace period for recovery has ended.
Lastly, click the blue Move to Trash button to complete the process of deleting the property your GA4 is tracking.
This method allows you to get rid of unused or test properties without wiping out the entire Account structure and other relevant business data.
Whoops, I Made a Mistake: How to Restore a GA4 Account or Property
If you’ve clicked the button and immediately regretted it, don’t panic. As long as you’re within the 35-day grace period, a full restoration is extremely easy. The account can be undeleted from the trash:
Return to the Admin section of your Google Analytics dashboard.
In the Account column with the help of the dropdown, select the Trash Can. It should appear in the menu as a folder to choose from if there are any items currently in its trash can.
You'll see a table listing all the accounts or properties currently in the trash, along with the date they were moved there and the date of their scheduled permanent deletion.
Check the box next to the account or property you want to restore.
Click the Restore button that appears above the table.
Your data, configurations, and user settings will be fully restored as if nothing ever happened.
Alternatives to Deleting Your GA4 Account
Sometimes, the desire to hit the delete button comes from frustration - the data looks wrong, you're tracking too much irrelevant traffic, or it just feels messy. Before you take the ultimate step, consider these alternatives:
Start Fresh with a New Property: Instead of deleting your whole account, you can create a brand-new GA4 property. This gives you a clean data set starting from scratch without destroying your historical archives. You can simply stop using the old one.
Manage User Access: If your goal is just to remove GA4 from your personal list of Google accounts, ask another administrator on your Google Analytics account to simply 'remove you'. This way, the data remains intact as an analytics asset, but it won't be clogging your personal workspace.
Filter and Edit Reports: If your data feels cluttered with spam or internal traffic, you can also start by creating filters to exclude unwanted data based on criteria you define within the GA4 platform. This can help "clean up" your reporting view without erasing the complete underlying data set that can always be retrieved later.
Final Thoughts
Deleting a GA4 account or property isn't technically difficult, but the decision carries significant weight. Always remember to check your product links, back up essential data, notify your team, and be absolutely certain you're deleting at the right organizational level - Account or Property. Knowing how to restore it within the first few weeks offers a helpful safety net.
Often, the urge to delete a platform like GA4 is a symptom of a larger data challenge. Manually navigating complex analytics dashboards or exporting reports just to get clear answers is tedious. At Graphed, we connect directly to your data sources - like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and all your sales platforms - so you don't have to hunt for insights. Instead of spending hours in the messy native GA4 interface wishing you could start over, you can use our platform to build real-time dashboards with simple natural language. This way, you stay focused on actionable insights instead of data wrangling.