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Export Universal Google Analytics data

Starting the week of July 1, 2024, you won’t be able to access any Universal Analytics (the old version of Google Analytics) properties and all data will be deleted by Google. If you want to keep historical data, you need to export your data out of the Google Analytics interface.

How to Export Your Data

  1. Go to the report that you want to export. Here are some commonly requested information and where to find them in the left-hand menu:
    • Audience > Geo > Location
      • Breakdown by country and city
    • Audience > Technology > Browser & OS
      • Breakdown of browser used, i.e. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.
    • Audience > Mobile > Overview
      • Breakdown of desktop, mobile, and tablet traffic
    • Acquisition > All Traffic > Source Medium
      • Breakdown of how users got to your site, i.e. Google search, social media, or direct link
    • Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
      • Shows you the top trafficked pages of your website
  2. Use an existing segment or create a new segment to show data for just your website. The university-wide account has data for most sites at OSU, so you can use segments to narrow down the data.
  3. Select your date range.
    • I recommend selecting either by month or year. This depends on how far back you want to save. If you want to go back 5 years, you can export by year. If you wanted only the past year, breaking down by month would be feasible.
  4. Select the number of rows you want. This is towards the bottom of the page. The maximum number of rows per page is 5,000. If your data exceeds 5,000 rows, you’ll need to create multiple reports.
  5. Click the Export button in the upper right and select your format.
    1. I recommend exporting as Excel or CSV as these will give you options to manipulate the data in Excel. PDFs will be static with no opportunity to further manipulate the data.
  6. It will download to your computer. I recommend saving it where others can access it, such as Box or Office365.

Here is a short YouTube video about how to export your data to CSV. It is older, but the process is still valid.

Exporting as CSV gives you flexibility going forward to leverage Excel’s functions to manipulate the data or its data visualization options.