--- title: "Saving historical GA data for Y-o-Y reporting with OWOX" canonical: "https://www.owox.com/blog/success-stories/saving-historical-ga-data" updated: "2026-10-12" --- # Saving Historical Google Analytics Universal Data for Year-over-Year Reporting Updated August 9, 2023 · [Ilya Chukhlyaev](/team/ilya-chukhlyaev) · 3 min read · Finance YoY · historical GA data preserved for reporting ![Saving Historical Google Analytics Universal Data for Year-over-Year Reporting](https://cdn.owox.ai/www/webflow/67943bf32e530bd2d05b7901_43332.png/public) ## The company Our partner, [InfoTrust](https://infotrust.com/what-we-do/) works with global brands to optimize the data collection, management, and understanding. Infotrust came to us for help with an analytics project for an insurance brand from New York, US. ![Infotrust](https://cdn.owox.ai/www/webflow/67943c3de167353f7430be97_43120.png/public) ## The challenge ### Fear of losing all of the historical GAU analytics data As the only analytics platform, the insurance company were using Google Analytics Universal, which were about to be deprecated on 1st July, 2023. ### Y-o-Y reporting The insurance company successfully transitioned to Google Analytics 4 reporting (GA4), but as the GA4 properties don’t have the backwards capabilities, and the data structure between GAU and GA4 is different, it was almost **impossible to compare marketing KPIs with Year-over-Year (YoY) reporting.** ## The goals The insurance company wanted to find a way to keep historical data from GA reports. OWOX allows to collect all of the historical reports data from Google Analytics Universal, storing in Google BigQuery, transforming to GA4 data structure, and visualizing with any BI tool, such as Looker Studio. The insurance company was interested in collecting the historical data so they can build out the reports for analytics use cases. ## The Turning Point OWOX Data Marts See your first report built in real time. _15 minutes._ 1. Connect your data warehouse 2. Pick your metrics 3. Get a live Google Sheets report In the time it takes to write a ticket. Then imagine never writing that ticket again. [Book a Demo](/book-a-call) We'll use your actual use case ## The implementation process In this particular case, only a fraction of OWOX capabilities have been used. We’ve helped the Infotrust client extract historical data from Google Analytics Universal and loaded them into the client’s Google BigQuery project. So now the insurance company keeps the full data ownership and doesn’t rely on third-party tools. Even though it looks like a breeze, we’ve experienced a few challenges, that we were able to overcome during the implementation phase: * understanding the combination of dimensions and metrics; * Google Analytics API limitations; * Data incompleteness; In order to successfully extract & load all of the data from GAU, It is important to understand the data structure, the history, and the context of different custom events, dimensions, and metrics to be able to create a proper schema for reports to export. For example, the OWOX team discovered that specific combinations of custom dimensions or custom events lead to excluding some amount of data. > It was great working with the OWOX team for building up the data pipelines to import Universal Analytics data into Google BigQuery, considering the recent UA depreciation. We were able to achieve synergies and efficiencies in building the solution by utilizing OWOX as a key component of the overall dataflow architecture. > > \-- Trish Dhotkar, Infotrust So together (Infotrust and OWOX teams) figured out how to combine all of those parameters properly and completed the project. ## Business results & opportunities After [OWOX Pipelines](/product/data-connectors) were set up, Infotrust client experienced several valuable benefits & opportunities: * Possibility to consider **historical** data in **current & future** analytical tasks; * More than **5 years** of historical data at a **daily level of granularity;** * Managed to collect the report’s data with both: standard and custom dimensions and metrics. As Google BigQuery was an essential part of this historical export process, our client decided to **start building out a warehouse** for all of their analytics data, so they could get the SSoT (**Single Source of Truth**) for marketing data across their organization. They’ve also set up the **native GA4→BigQuery export** so in the future, Google Analytics Universal data and GA4 data will be used together in some sort of combination, to **explore trends over the years.** ## Next steps Infotrust is planning to repeat the same process of saving historical GAU data for other clients. ## Your New Normal Turn your data into decisions. Governed data marts give you the clean foundation ML needs to actually work. * No AI hallucinations * Analyst-governed definitions * Every number traces to SQL [Get started free](https://www.owox.com/app-signup) ## Who wrote this ![Ilya Chukhlyaev](https://cdn.owox.ai/www/webflow/67920866ea6c69e3fbd363ad_Ill.png/public) [Ilya Chukhlyaev](/team/ilya-chukhlyaev) · Analytics Solution Architect Ilya Chukhlyaev is an Analytics Solution Architect at OWOX, where he designs analytics solutions for enterprise teams working with data warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake, and Redshift. He specializes in data modeling, ETL pipelines, and building scalable reporting systems using SQL. Ilya writes about analytics engineering, data architecture, and practical approaches to marketing measurement. 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Where the page has a Markdown twin, its address follows the link. - [Ilya Chukhlyaev](https://www.owox.com/team/ilya-chukhlyaev) — /team/ilya-chukhlyaev.md - [Book a Demo](https://www.owox.com/book-a-call) — /book-a-call.md - [OWOX Pipelines](https://www.owox.com/product/data-connectors) — /product/data-connectors.md - [Get started free](https://www.owox.com/app-signup) - [GA4](https://www.owox.com/blog/topics/ga4) — /blog/topics/ga4.md - [Case Studies](https://www.owox.com/blog/topics/case-study) — /blog/topics/case-study.md - [Marketing Analytics](https://www.owox.com/blog/topics/marketing-analytics) — /blog/topics/marketing-analytics.md - [OWOX](https://www.owox.com/blog/topics/owox-bi) — /blog/topics/owox-bi.md - [European Bank: Use advanced analytics to reduce low-quality apps · Sep 6, 2021](https://www.owox.com/blog/success-stories/advanced-analytics-to-increase-conversions) — /blog/success-stories/advanced-analytics-to-increase-conversions.md - [FxPro: Monitoring web data quality: FxPro case study · Apr 9, 2020](https://www.owox.com/blog/success-stories/case-how-to-keep-track-of-data-quality) — /blog/success-stories/case-how-to-keep-track-of-data-quality.md - [IQ Option: Google Ads: assisted conversions analysis by IQ Option · May 21, 2018](https://www.owox.com/blog/success-stories/iq-option) — /blog/success-stories/iq-option.md