It seems as though every company out there is going GDPR crazy, with only a few days to go.
Because of this, you may have missed out on some actually important actions to take before the looming deadline of May 25th
If you’ve logged onto Google Analytics lately you’ve likely seen some sort of colourful banner at the top of the page, reminding you to accept some new terms and conditions or privacy policy, much like the one below.
Another banner that showed briefly during the past couple of weeks referred to a new tool implemented in Google Analytics – Data Retention.
It can be found in the admin panel on Analytics and essentially, relates to how long data will now be stored from your analytics traffic.
The default it now changes to keep your data on record and view-able within Analytics is 26 months – so just over 2 years of data. For many people, this is likely more than enough to do comparisons on previous years data
However, if you want to keep data longer than this, you might benefit from going into Analytics before Friday, May 25th and changing this option to 35 or 50 months, or even just set it to not expire.
Analytics only collects anonymous data, as required by current laws, and so this data isn’t subject to certain policies under GDPR that mean you would need to delete this data. You can set this expiry to when you feel most comfortable keeping that data, and if you are happy to only have 2 years of data on record, then you can always leave it at the default.
To change this you can go to the Admin panel in Analytics, then underneath the ‘Property section’ in Tracking Info click ‘Data Retention’ and you can then change this option.
Countdown to GDPR…
