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Connector Improvement: Google Analytics - Make "Date" dimension not mandatory

Not planned
Nicolas Klimoff User

Would it be possible to make "Date" not a required dimension?

Adding the "Date" and "Year" dimensions together cause the tables to return empty or with very little data in the case of Google Analytics accounts with little amounts of Sessions, and therefore we would like to only capture yearly data instead. 

This feature is available in the Power Bi Google Analytics connector. 

Thank you.

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Comments

3 comments

Date Votes
  • Official comment
    Drew Fivetranner

    Hi Nicolas and Dan, Drew from the Product Team here!

    The Date field is a required field for Fivetran in order to allow for efficient export of data from the Google Analytics platform. Due to speed and volume limitations, we pull reporting based on date ranges.

    In the past we have evaluated strategies to pull data without the Date field, but it led to unreliability and other issues.

    We could potentially reevaluate this with the newer Data API for GA4, but for now I will be marking this as not planned.

  • Dan Cooke User

    Completely agree. This is not required by the API so should not be required by Fivetran.

  • Andre Koot User
    I ran also into this major issue.
     
    For clients we would like to generate reports with specific metrics on a month based aggregation. Now FiveTran requires me to add the Date dimension (which is in YYYYMMDD).
     
    But including the Date dimension would skew the numbers of newUsers and Users metrics. Day granularity/aggregation does not simply add up to a month granularity/aggregation.
    That is the way how Google Analytics calculates new users.
     
    Example taken from the source Google Analytics: 1 nov 2021 - 31 dec 2021
     
    Day aggregation:
    If you add up newUsers per day nov 2021 the total will be: 33,245
    If you add up newUsers per day dec 2021 the total will be: 29,161
    Total of 62,406
     
    Month aggregation:
    nov 2021: 33,225
    nov 2021: 29,133
    Total: 62,358
     
    Clients require us to report also on weekly, monthly and yearly granularity.  In fact they will compare the results of a custom dashboard with what they see in Google Analytics UI.
     
    Other API/ingestion tools like SuperMetrics, Google Analytics AddIn for Google Sheets, etc do not require the Date dimension.
     
    Looking forward to a solution.
     
    Thank you.

    With kind regards,

    André Koot <andre@maxlead.com>

    T. +3171 542 53 06 | M. +316 15 87 25 24

    Maxlead | Wilhelminapark 17 | 2342 AD Oegstgeest

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