GOV.UK GA4
Google Analytics 4 is used to collect data on the usage of GOV.UK.
This data can be accessed via the Google Analytics 4 user interface, the GA4 Looker Studio connection, and the Google Analytics Data API.
This data is also exported to BigQuery.
Information on how to understand and use this data can be found in the Analysis section of this site.
Content
Data first started being collected into this property on 23/09/22.
The events captured have changed significantly over time, and so early data quality may be patchy.
Access
All GDS staff should have ‘Analyst’ level access to the data. If you have any issues accessing the data, please contact the Analytics team.
Data users across government can request access to the GOV.UK GA4 data via their organisation’s analytics SPOC. For more information, see the GA access policy.
Location
There are three GA4 GOV.UK properties. These correspond to the integration, staging, and production or live GOV.UK websites.
GA4 settings
Data collection
GA4’s inbuilt ‘Enhanced measurement’ feature is not in use on GOV.UK as it was determined that it would not meet our data collection needs. However, default GA4 dimensions have been used wherever there is a clear fit to the event being captured to ensure that GDS will benefit from any default reporting functionality associated with those events and dimensions. Tracking has been implemented on GOV.UK using custom dataLayer pushes which are sent to GA4 with Google Tag Manager. More information on this approach can be found in our Implementation record.
Google Signals data collection and Ads personalisation is disabled for GDS GA4 properties within the interface. Both of these options are also disabled in Google Tag Manager, to ensure that these settings cannot be accidentally changed.
Granular location and device data collection is enabled to allow reporting on the city-level location and devices used by our users.
The reporting timezone is set to United Kingdom Time.
Data processing and modification
At present, we have not created any custom events or designated any events as conversions within GA4.
No subproperties are set up for the GOV.UK GA4 properties. Instead, we are using BigQuery and Looker Studio to clean, filter, and control access to the data.
We are also not using GA4’s inbuilt data redaction feature on GOV.UK. Instead, we are applying redaction to strip out potential Personally Identifable Information (PII) from values before they are pushed to the dataLayer (see our documentation on this in GitHub). Additional PII redaction is also applied in Google Tag Manager as a fail-safe. If you spot any PII or other data that should not be present in the 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.