De-Activating Google Signals for Accurate Reporting in GA4

Do you ever feel like your GA4 reports are inaccurate or missing data? You may have a GA4 feature enabled which may be the root cause of the issue. In the article below, we will discuss what Google Signals is, how it can negatively impact your GA4 reports, & how you can correct this issue!

What Exactly is Google Signals for GA4?

Google Signals is a feature in Google Analytics 4 that associates session data from sites and apps with users who have signed into their Google accounts and enabled ad personalization. This data is used for cross-device reporting, remarketing, and exporting cross-device conversion data to Google Ads. Google Signals measures users across devices, improving the accuracy of user counts in reporting and enabling cross-platform audience evaluation. Activation of Google Signals allows for the creation of remarketing audiences from Google Analytics data, which can be shared with linked advertising accounts for targeted advertising campaigns. The feature also collects additional demographic and interest information from device identifiers and signed-in Google users.

Sounds great, right? Once you have enabled the GA4 settings to utilize Google Signals for data collection purposes, you can enable GA4 to include Google Signals in your GA4 reporting identity. However, this is something that Measure Marketing Pros (& now Google) strongly recommends against. Let's talk about it →

What is the Impact of Google Signals on Standard GA4 Reports?

Since the July adoption of GA4, I have been approached by many users with very similar questions, statements, & concerns regarding the accuracy of their GA4 reports: “My reports in GA4 look WAY off. Conversion & attribution data does not reflect what I was seeing in Universal Analytics”. While this issue can be a symptom of many different things, I (and many others in the measurement community) began to notice a common trend among these accounts: the enablement of Google signals in the property’s reporting identity. To put it plainly, Google was applying thresholding to reports in GA4, resulting in users not having the complete dataset included in their GA4 reports. Ultimately, this side effect was becoming a major pain point & negatively impacting marketers' ability to grasp the full picture of their marketing efforts/performance with GA4’s reports.

Why is Google Signals Applying Thresholds in GA4?

Here is Google’s answer:

“Data thresholds are applied to prevent anyone viewing a report or exploration from inferring the identity or sensitive information of individual users based on demographics, interests, or other signals present in the data.”

Because many of the brands I have been working with are small to mid-size, the traffic volume to the website typically ranges from a few hundred users to a couple thousand users per month. They were feeling the impact of this thresholding across all of their attribution channels & simply had no idea that this was occurring because of Google Signals. For these brands, the cons of Google signals far outweighed the pros – so our recommendation always has been to disable the feature. Nonetheless, large brands attracting droves of users to their website can still see the impacts of Google Signals thresholding when they view data within relatively small date ranges.

Following our recommendation to disable this feature, insights became much easier to come by in GA4 as the complete dataset became available in reports using data ranges post-disablement! On Dec. 8th, even Google recognized the paint-point that this feature was causing & announced their plan to remove signals for the reporting identity from GA4 on Feb. 12th, 2024.

If you are feeling the impact of Google signals on your reporting, there is no need to wait for Google to disable this feature.

How Can You Identify Thresholding in GA4 Reports?

Luckily, identifying thresholding in GA4 reports in very easy because GA4 will tell us when this thresholding is applied to any of our standard reports. If you are seeing a message identical to the one below when viewing GA4 reports, you have identified thresholding.

(For brands with higher traffic volume, you may need to reduce the date range in your reports to view the past 7 days or less in order to have this message displayed.)

Disabling Signals in GA4 Reporting

Good news: disabling Google Signals in the reporting identity is just as simple as spotting the thresholding occurring in reports.

Here is a how you can disable this feature →

1. Identify if you are using Google Signals in GA4.
2. In Admin, under Data collection and modification, click Data Collection.
3. Locate the “Include Google signals in reporting identity” section of Google Signals data collection panel.
4. Toggle the switch “OFF”.

Your settings should look like this now:

An important note: This change to your reporting identity will not be retroactively applied. Only your reporting data ranges moving forward will no longer be impacted by Google Signals thresholding.

Congratulations! You are now on the path to extracting clear & actionable insights from your GA4 reports.