Last Updated: May 20, 2022

What is Google Signals?

Google Signals is an upgraded version of Google Advertising Reporting Features. 

It makes it possible for GA to collect cross-device data from the website users who meet the following criteria:

1. The website users have signed in to one of their Google accounts (Gmail, YouTube, etc) while interacting with your website and
2. The website users have turned on Ads Personalization.

What are the advantages of using Google Signals?

The cross-device data collected via Google Signals can be used to achieve the following objectives:

1. You can understand the cross-device behaviour of your website users who have signed in to one of their Google accounts and who have turned on Ads Personalization.
2. You can remarket to website users across devices.
3. You can optimize users’ experiences across devices.
4. You can optimize ad spend and deliver ads based on cross-device usage.

What are the limitations of the data collected by Google Signals?

At present any additional data (i.e. the data other than the one which is already collected by Google Advertising Reporting features) collected by Google Signals can not be:

1. Exported to BigQuery.
2. Used in Google Analytics dashboards.
3. Used in custom reports
4. Used in custom tables.
5. Accessed in user id views.
6. Segmented via the GA ‘segments’ feature.
7. Accessed in mobile app properties.
8. Accessed via GA reporting API
9. Used in Google Data Studio reports
10. Used to generate a smart list.

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How to Activate Google Signals for a Google Analytics Property

Follow the steps below:

Step-1: Navigate to the Google Analytics property for which you want to activate Google Signals. Make sure you have got ‘edit’ permission for the property.

Step-2: Navigate to the ‘Admin’ section by clicking on the ‘Admin’ link:

Step-3: Click on the ‘Tracking Info‘ drop-down menu under the ‘Property‘ column:

Step-4: Click on the ‘Data Collection’ link:

Step-5: Click on the ‘Get Started’ button:

Step-6: Read the benefits of activating Google Signals and then click on the continue button:

Step-7: Select the properties for which you want to activate Google Signals. You can activate Google signals for all properties (within your GA account), current property, or specific properties:

Step-8: Once you have selected the properties for which you want to activate Google Signals then click on the ‘Activate’ button.

Step-9: Click on the ‘Done’ button as shown below:

You should now see a screen like the one below:

At this point, if you want to disable Google Signals just switch the toggle button to ‘OFF’.

Step-10: Click on the ‘Save’ button.

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Once the Google Signals is activated for your GA property, you should now be able to access the cross-device reports under the ‘Audience’ menu:

Google Analytics starts collecting cross-device data from the day, you first activated Google Signals for your property. GA cross-device data does not work retroactively.

Google Analytics applies a fixed system-defined (and unknown) threshold to cross-device data to prevent you from viewing the cross-device activities of an individual user. 

So unless your reporting view has collected enough cross-device data to overcome this threshold, you may not see any data in your cross-device reports.

Instead, you may see the following notification bar:

Depending upon the volume of traffic your website gets, it may take days or even weeks before you can see data being populated in your ‘cross-device reports’.

Note: If your website gets a very low volume of traffic, say 3k-4k visits a month, you may not be able to see any data for your cross-device reports regardless of how long you wait.

Activating Google Signals for Roll-Up Properties

A roll-up property is a special type of GA property whose hit data comes from other GA properties (also known as source properties). In other words, a roll-up property is made up of two or more source properties.

A roll-up property is used to implement roll-up reporting in Google Analytics.

Google recommends that you should activate Google Signals for your roll-up property and all source properties.

When you use the roll-up reporting with Google signals activated, users are deduplicated across devices and across the domains of your source properties.

Cross-Device Tracking, Users’ Privacy, and GDPR

In order to protect users’ privacy while using cross-device tracking, Google uses a number of measures.

Following are the various privacy measures that have been put into place to make it very difficult to track the cross-device activities of an individual user:

#1 Google Analytics display only aggregated and anonymized data from your website users

These are the users who have signed in to one of their Google accounts (Gmail, Google+, YouTube, etc) and who have turned on Ads Personalization.

#2 Google Analytics applies a fixed system-defined (and unknown) threshold to cross-device data.

This threshold has been placed to prevent you from viewing the cross-device activities of an individual user. 

So unless your reporting view has collected enough cross-device data to overcome this threshold, you may not see any data in your cross-device reports. 

Instead, you may see the following notification: 

“Sorry, your cross-device reports do not have enough data to generate.”

#3 Google Analytics has made collecting PII data against its term of service.

PII stands for personally identifiable information. 

Google considers any information that reveals the identity, contact or location of an individual as PII information.

If Google identifies that PII is being collected or sent to your reports, it can terminate your account.

#4 If you are collecting cross-device data via user ID then you are required to make sure that it does not include any PII.

Collecting PII (personally identifiable information) data in GA is against the Google Analytics Terms of Service and could result in account suspension.

#5 If you are using user ID to personally identify a person away from Google Analytics (like in a CRM) then you should first get prior affirmative consent of your website users.

In fact, if you are using the user ID feature of GA then at the time of sign up, you should get prior affirmative consent from your website users.

You should disclose that you are going to track their activities across different devices and browsers.

This is required in order to comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

#6 By default, Google Analytics retains user-specific data for inactive website users for only 26 months, before automatically deleting it.

The user-specific data is the data associated with cookies, user identifiers, or advertising identifiers.

If you do not want Google Analytics to retain user-specific data for 26 months then you can change your data retention setting associated with your GA property.

The ‘Data Retention’ is one of the settings you see in the section named ‘Tracking Info’ under the ‘Property’ column in your GA admin:

Through the ‘user and event data retention’ feature, you can set the amount of time for which Google Analytics retains user-specific data for an inactive website user, before automatically deleting it.

You can set the amount of time setting to 14 months, 26 months, 38 months, 50 months, or ‘do not automatically expire’:

The period of time, for which Google Analytics retains user-specific data for inactive website users is called the ‘retention period’.

The user-specific data is automatically deleted on a monthly basis i.e. (once a month) unless your retention period is set to ‘do not automatically expire’.

For example, if you set the ‘User and event data retention’ to ‘50 months’ then any user-specific data older than 50 months will be automatically deleted, during the next monthly deletion process.

Note: It is important to remember that not all GA data older than 50 months will be deleted. Only user-specific data (i.e. data that is associated with cookies, user identifiers, or advertising identifiers) older than 50 months will be automatically deleted. In other words, you won’t see empty GA reports for data older than 50 months.

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If you want the retention period of your website users’ data to be renewed (i.e extended) with each new event from that user then turn the ‘Reset on new activity’ to on:

For example,

If you set the ‘user and event data retention’ to ‘14 months’ and turn the ‘reset on new activity’ to ‘ON’ then every time a user’s visit your website, the data retention period associated with the user, will be extended for another 14 months and thus never reaches the 14 months expiration date.

Turn the ‘reset on new activity’ to ‘OFF’ if you do not want the retention period of your users’ data to be renewed (i.e extended) with each new event from that user.

Related Article: GDPR for Google Analytics. Find out how to prepare via Checklist

Frequently asked questions about Google Signals