GA4’s 14-Month Wall: Why BigQuery Export Is Your Only Year-Over-Year
GA4 deletes event-level data after 14 months at most, and the default is just 2 months, so year-over-year comparisons in Explorations quietly break. The retention limit hits Exploration and funnel reports, not standard aggregated reports. Because GA4’s BigQuery export does not backfill any history, the only durable fix is to enable export before you need the data, so events flow into BigQuery and persist with no retention limit. For most small WooCommerce stores the cost runs under 5 dollars a month, making BigQuery the practical home for long-term analysis.