GOV.UK blogs GA4
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is used to collect data on the usage of the GOV.UK blogs.
This data can be accessed via the Google Analytics 4 user interface, the GA4 Looker Studio connection, and the Google Analytics Data API.
Information on how to understand and use this data can be found in the Analysis section of this site.
Content
Data was first collected into this property on 07/06/22.
Access
Blog editors should be able to grant users access to the blogs GA4 property.
If you have any issues, please contact the GOV.UK GA4 support inbox.
Location
There are is one GA4 property for all GOV.UK blogs data.
In Universal Analytics, ‘views’ were used to separate out the data associated with each blog site. ‘Views’ do not exist in GA4, so all of the blogs data is stored together. If you only wish to see the data for a selection of blogs, you will need to filter to the blog or blogs you are interested in.
GA4 settings
Property set-up
At set-up, we chose the following reporting options:
- Reporting timezone of United Kingdom - (GMT+01:00) United Kingdom Time
- Currency is British Pound (£)
- Industry category of Law and Government
- When asked about our business objectives (which determines which standard reports GA4 will provide in the property), we chose ‘Get baseline reports’
Data collection
Google Signals data collection and Ads personalisation is disabled for GDS GA4 properties within the interface.
Granular location and device data collection is enabled to allow reporting on the city-level location and devices used by our users.
Data processing and modification
At present, we have not created any custom events or designated any events as conversions within GA4.
We are also not using GA4’s inbuilt data redaction feature on GOV.UK. If you spot any PII or other data that should not be present in any GDS GA4 datasets, please raise a Zendesk ticket or contact the Analytics team.
Retention
A data retention period for this data is set in the GA4 user interface. For the integration, staging, and production GOV.UK sites, this is set to 38 months.