GA4’s Data API quotas are breaking Looker Studio reports

We wanted to share some information about a recent change Google Analytics has made to the GA4 Data API, that could be causing your GA4-based Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboards to error.

Since the 7th November, Looker Studio reports that connect to Google Analytics 4 data are subject to Google Analytics Data API (GA4) quotas.

Note: this is not just affecting Looker Studio. These quotas are for the GA4 Data API so any tools that pull data from GA4 via this API will be subject to these same quotas. For example, Power BI, Tableau, Google Sheets or Excel add-ons for GA4, etc.

If any of your Looker Studio reports are affected by these quotas, you will see one of the errors listed here https://support.google.com/looker-studio/answer/12182485#ga4-quota&zippy=%2Cin-this-article%2Csteps-to-resolve.

The actual quotas can be seen here https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/data/v1/quotas, but the one most likely to impact reports from what we have seen so far is the one I’ve highlighted below for the maximum number of concurrent requests being set at 10.

That is, only 10 requests can be made to the API at any one point in time. This can effectively make any dashboard with >10 charts per page useless at present (although the requests do not quite work in such a one-to-one way).

We at Measurelab are not alone in being very frustrated about this. There is a lot of dissatisfaction online within the analytics community, with many people experiencing issues with reports that were previously working, now erroring.

A small silver lining however, is that the Looker Studio team have replied to a public community post about this, saying they are looking into solutions to work around this quota limitation. But there is no ETA, and we don’t really know what this solution will look like yet.

The official suggestions from the Google Looker Studio team to deal with this are listed here (but also below in bullets) https://support.google.com/looker-studio/answer/12182485#ga4-quota&zippy=%2Cin-this-article%2Csteps-to-resolve.

• Reduce the traffic to the report. Consider sharing the report with fewer people, and don’t embed the report in a high traffic website.
• Reduce the number of charts on each page.
• Extract the Google Analytics 4 data and use the extracted data instead of the Google Analytics 4 data source.
  • Note: you’ll need to wait until any exceeded quotas have refreshed before you can extract the data. Depending on the quota exceeded, this can take up to 24 hours.
• Export your Analytics data to BigQuery, then use the BigQuery connector to visualize that data in Looker Studio.
• Upgrade to Analytics 360.
• Consider using a partner connector.

In our view, these are far from ideal. We are hoping that the backlash will lead Google to reconsider, but of course we have no way of knowing that or their motivations for making this change in the first place.

If you have reports that are affected by this change (i.e. suddenly breaking, with one of the errors shown on the page linked at the top of this post) then please let us know and we can discuss it together to determine the best course of action.