About enhanced data freshness
Data freshness is how long it takes Analytics to collect and process a hit from your property. If that process takes 20 minutes, then Data Freshness = 20 minutes.
Enhanced data freshness shortens the time between user interactions and your opportunity to analyze those interactions so you can understand within minutes the results of things like Analytics configuration changes or new site designs. For example:
- The effects of new filters on your Analytics data
- Whether changes to your ecommerce site are affecting product sales
- How users are responding to new headline stories
Analytics delivers different intervals of data freshness:
| Interval | Processing time | 360/Standard Properties | Data limits per property |
Guarantee (when data limits are observed) |
Query coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enhanced data freshness | 10 minutes - 1 hour | 360 | < 2B hits per month | No | Most reports and API queries Learn more |
| 360 intraday | < 4 hours | 360 | < 2B hits per month | Yes | All reports and API queries, except these |
| 360 daily | < 24 hours | 360 | N/A | Yes | All reports and API queries |
| Standard intraday | < 24 hours | Standard | <200k sessions per day | No | All reports and API queries, except these |
| Standard daily | 24-48 hours | Standard | < 10M hits per month | No | All reports and API queries |
Enhanced data freshness works on a best-effort basis: if for some reason the freshest data isn't available, then Analytics returns the next most-recent data. Enhanced data freshness normally takes 15-20 minutes, depending on factors like the amount of activity on the property and Analytics system load. This processing time is currently applied to most data collected by the Analytics tracking code, and is not applied to data that results from integrations with other products (e.g, Google Ads, any Google Marketing Platform products) or from data import.
Where you see the data
With some exceptions, enhanced data freshness is available in the the following groups of reports when the date range includes the current day:
- Audience
- Behavior
- Conversion
When enhanced data freshness is available in a report, you see a text notice to that effect that tells you how recently the data was processed:
This fresher data is also available via our BigQuery Export. Clients have the option of opting into our continuous export mode, which exports data every 10-15 minutes to Google Cloud. Learn more
Limits
Enhanced data freshness does not support the following at the view and report levels:
View level
- Views that contain data from properties that have been disabled for intra-day process for exceeding limits
- Views for which you’ve implemented User ID
- Views that include filters based on imported data
- Views that include filters based on the Source, Medium, or Campaign dimension
- Views whose filters are based upon integrations with advertiser or publisher platforms (e.g., Google Ads, AdSense, Google Ad Manager, any Google Marketing Platform advertising products )
Report level
- Reports that include data imported via the processing-time mode
- Reports that include the Campaign dimension
- Reports that include dimensions based upon integrations with advertiser or publisher platforms (e.g., Google Ads, AdSense, Google Ad Manager, any Google Marketing Platform advertising products)
Enhanced data freshness does not support Channel Groupings.
Enhanced data freshness works on a best-effort basis: it works as fast as it can at all times, but if it encounters an issue, it doesn't wait or retry. As a result, you may notice occasionally that fresher data is not available as you expect. This can occur when a single property has many views, a view has many filters and/or the filters are complex (e.g., extensive use of regex), or there are a large number of hits to a single property.
If your property has not sent a hit in more than 28 days, enhanced data freshness is not in effect for that property. As soon as that property sends a request for data (via the Analytics interface or the API), enhanced data freshness resumes, and you’ll start seeing data the following day.
