Import data from Google Analytics

paolodamico commented 3 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem?

From customer calls we know that a few users come to PostHog from GA.

Describe the solution you'd like

It'd be nice if you can easily import your GA historical data to PostHog. This would make the transition to PostHog a lot easier, and reduce the switching cost for our customers.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Adding some tutorial to explain to the users how to do this manually.

Additional context

Suggested by a current user.
Also worth considering that we're primarily focused on product analytics while GA is web analytics, so maybe this migration it's not a big a use case as we would expect.

Thank you for your feature request – we love each and every one!

TechWatching commented 2 years ago

Any news on this one ?

mariusandra commented 2 years ago

The brief research we did showed that this is not possible. GA doesn't even store all your data the further back in time it goes, so there's no way to get the raw events back out.

adgrig commented 1 year ago

Resurrecting an old thread. @mariusandra -- this is not true for apps/ sites that have enabled GA4's BigQuery integration. So a GCP integration would be able to tap into BigQuery, transform the data from GA4's schema to PostHog's, and ingest it. Would that be doable for you?

adgrig commented 1 month ago

With the risk of sounding abrasive, I don't welcome this opinion, Stuart. The feature request came from some people who wanted it - hence the name. It wouldn't affect those who don't*, so developing it is strictly a matter of it making sense to the PostHog team. If some asked for extra salt at a table near you, you wouldn't tell them it's atypical and you've never heard of anyone asking for extra salt. It's bad manners.

Moreover - at the time of writing, historical data can be imported from several other tools ( Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, or LaunchDarkly). So there is some value in grabbing data from other tools. GA4 may not be worthwhile for the team and that's fine - it is their product after all - but from that to "nobody checks past data" is a leap. Especially since, in recent times, MMM has gained significant traction and it requires a decent amount of data (at least 12 months or several Sales Cycles).

*I concede that it would take development time away from other features potentially desired by people not interested in this one, but again - a challenge for the PO.

On Mon, 30 Sept 2024, 18:21 Stuart Brameld, @.***> wrote:

IMHO, as a marketer and consultant, this feels like an enormous amount of engineering effort and arguably not a deal breaker. I've moved a number of clients from GA to PostHog, none have asked to import data, and we've just agreed that we'll run both GA and PostHog in parallel for a period of time and then remove GA at a predetermined date - normally at the start of the year. In my (B2B) marketing world analytics is typically a weekly/monthly/quarterly thing. It's relatively rare to go back and report on data from previous years as things change so quickly it's often irrelevant. Just my opinion, others may disagree but thought worth sharing.

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stuartbrameld commented 1 month ago

@adgrig apologies Adrian, this certainly wasn't the intention, I was purely trying to offer an alternative point of view. For what it's worth, nowhere did I write "nobody checks past data". Anyway, I've deleted my comment as keen to avoid any conflict here 🙏

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