Data Compounding & Longevity Archives

GA4 Caps Data Retention at 14 Months — BigQuery Keeps Events Forever

May 19, 2026 by

GA4’s free tier caps event-level data retention at 14 months — and the default is just 2 months. Once deleted, the data is gone permanently. BigQuery stores the same events indefinitely at $0.02/GB per month for active data and $0.01/GB after 90 days. A WooCommerce store doing $1M in annual revenue typically generates under 5 GB of event data per year, making indefinite retention a few dollars per month. Every year-over-year comparison, cohort analysis, and LTV calculation your dashboard attempts is bounded by what the warehouse underneath still holds.

Your Black Friday 2026 Is Being Decided This Week. Here’s the Calendar.

April 22, 2026 by

Today is April 22, 2026. Black Friday is November 27 — 31 weeks away. That sounds like plenty of time until you stack the 2026 migration calendar on top of Smart Bidding’s learning-phase math, and the calendar collapses. Smart Bidding needs at least 50 conversions or 3 full conversion cycles to calibrate — a minimum … Read more

Why Your Two-Year-Old BigQuery Data Is More Valuable Than Last Week’s Dashboard

April 17, 2026 by

Historical BigQuery event data compounds in value over time because questions about seasonality, cohort retention, customer lifetime value, and product lifecycle require 12-24 months of history to answer reliably. Last week’s dashboard shows velocity; two-year-old data shows pattern. Unlike code or content, historical event data cannot be recreated — if you didn’t capture it then, you can’t query it now. For WooCommerce stores running first-party tracking into BigQuery, every month of retained data widens an advantage competitors cannot buy back. The clock started on Day 1.