Overcoming the GA4 Quotas in Looker Studio | GlowMetrics

Dec 20th 2022

Digital Analytics Insights

3 min read

Posted by Hannah Magorrian

Overcoming the GA4 Quotas in Looker Studio

Are limited GA4 Quotas causing errors in your Looker Studio/Google Data Studio reports? Have you looked at your Looker Studio dashboard built with the GA4 connector only to be met...

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Are limited GA4 Quotas causing errors in your Looker Studio/Google Data Studio reports? Have you looked at your Looker Studio dashboard built with the GA4 connector only to be met with a page full of spanners? You are not the only one. A Google Analytics 4 update has created a huge problem for anyone reporting on GA4 properties via Looker Studio. Why? Because Google changed its API limits for concurrent requests or GA4 quotas.

What Happened to GA4 Quotas?

On the 10 of November, Google announced a change to GA4 quotas for Looker Studio reports. The quotas that have the biggest impact on Looker Studio reports are concurrent requests and hourly tokens, meaning how many users can view a report simultaneously, and how much data you can request per day and hour. After the update, a GA4 property can make the following:

  • 1,250 tokens per hour
  • 25,000 tokens per day
  • 10 concurrent requests

Google suggests that a simple chart will use around 10 tokens, however, large amounts of data and actions taken within the dashboard, like applying filters and changing the date range, will require more tokens. Exceeding these quotas in a Looker Studio report will display error messages including “Looker studio cannot connect to your data set”, “Exhausted concurrent request quota” and “Data Set Configuration Error”. In practice, it is easy to see that a dashboard with multiple charts being accessed by various users could quickly exceed the hourly and daily tokens and concurrent requests.

 

 

How Can I Solve the GA4 Quotas Issue in Looker Studio?

The Looker Studio team at Google has stated that they are working on a solution, however, we have yet to find more detailed information and we don’t currently know when the problem will be resolved. Until then, there are a number of possible workarounds for this problem that we can recommend:

1. Go Back to Universal Analytics

If your Universal Analytics is still up and running you may be able to revert back to using Universal Analytics for your dashboards, instead of using GA4. However, this is a short-term solution as Universal Analytics will be sunset in July 2023 and if the problem hasn’t been resolved by then, well, it’s back to square one.

2. Upgrade Google Analytics 360

It is possible to gain more tokens and more GA4 quotas by upgrading to Google Analytics 360. An upgrade will raise your concurrent requests up to 50, hourly tokens up to 12,500 and daily tokens up to 250,000. While a GA360 license does bump up your daily GA4 quotas, it also comes at a significant cost, based on the volume of your event collection.

3. Try GA4 Explorations

GA4 Explorations allows you to create custom reports and could be used as an alternative to Looker Studio. However, the abilities of this tool are much more limited than Looker Studio and the date range is only 90 days.

4. Give BigQuery a Go

Implementing BigQuery is a possible option to avoid the limitations placed on the native Looker Studio GA4 connector as it allows you to store all your data from Google Analytics in a data warehouse, allowing you to connect this to Looker Studio directly. However, your data will only be available from the day you integrate GA4 with BigQuery and therefore historical data is not available.

5. Use Partner Connectors

Another option is to use Google Partner Connectors. A free option is using Google Sheets to pull through Analytics data and connected to Looker Studio. This would bypass issues in Looker Studio caused by using the GA4 connector. However, this option can become difficult and time-consuming when your spreadsheets contain large amounts of data. Paid third-party connectors include Supermetrics, which allows you to pull data from multiple sources including GA4.

We hope this post gives you some options to solve the GA4 API limitations.

For more on Looker Studio (the artist formerly known as Google Data Studio), check out our other guides, including Page and Section Management and a guide to Sharing Reports and Dashboards, on the GlowMetrics blog.

Please feel free to ask a question or leave a comment below, or contact us at contact@glowmetrics.com. You can also follow us on @GlowMetrics for more tips and news within the world of Digital Analytics and Marketing.

Confused by GA4? Check out the Glow Analytics Academy for GA4 Our GA4 Training Course is led by certified GA4 experts who have years of experience working with businesses of all sizes. We’ll teach you everything you need to know about GA4, from setting up your account and tracking your data to creating custom reports and using advanced features.

We’ve developed a schedule of 6 x 3-hour sessions across GTM for GA4, the GA4 Interface, Reports and Insights, and Looker Studio for GA4. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to confidently use GA4 to track and analyse your user data, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions to drive business growth. Interested? We’ll be running courses throughout 2023.

Check out our available GA4 Training course dates in Belfast & Dublin.


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One response to “Overcoming the GA4 Quotas in Looker Studio”

  1. This article is a valuable resource for anyone working with these platforms and facing quota limitations. It’s well-structured and provides actionable insights that can make a significant difference in analytics projects. Thanks for sharing this expertise!

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GlowMetrics

Posted by
Hannah Magorrian

Hannah is a Digital Analytics Executive at GlowMetrics, working on creating data dashboards and assisting on wider analytics work across Google Analytics and Data Studio.
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