RebelMouse has always been proud to provide our clients with customized Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboards in order to visualize all sorts of data associated with your sites. Unfortunately, Google has recently announced that in conjunction with GA4, there will now be severe limitations on the data you will be able to see in your Looker Studio dashboard. Essentially, they’ve introduced quota limits on the amount of data available to you at any given time.
When we discovered this, we immediately went to work on figuring out a way to help our clients keep their data insights (without having to shell out for Google Analytics 360). Though, with the limitations, it has proven to be a struggle.
Starting in mid November 2022, Looker Studio integrations with GA4 have been showing "tokens" quota limitation errors, which we initially thought Google would resolve. However, Google confirmed at the end of last year that they're moving forward with applying a "tokens" quota limitation across GA4 Looker Studio dashboards.
The quota limits being applied are below:
- Standard GA Property Limit: 1,750 tokens per project per property per hour
- Paid GA Property (GA 360) Limit: 17,500 tokens per project per property per hour
- Official reference about all quota limitations can be found here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/data/v1/quotas
- Official reference about the limitation news can be found here: https://support.google.com/looker-studio/thread/188075021?hl=en&msgid=193719770
Unfortunately, this means extreme limitations on how many components (e.g., metrics, graphs) you can have running per hour before reaching the quota limits, making Looker Studio dashboards everywhere unable to function as elaborately as they previously have. Even with very basic use, the limit of 1,750 tokens per hour for standard properties is very easily exceeded. This quota limitation does unfortunately apply to our RebelMouse GA4 Looker Studio dashboards as well.
As a workaround, here's how we can move forward using GA4 Looker Studio dashboards for reporting purposes:
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Compress the amount of metrics and graphs per dashboard to be under 1,750 tokens.
This is so that the dashboard can be loaded fully and/or sent to your email(s) without any quota errors. -
Limit GA4 Looker Studio dashboard consumption per hour.
After each page has been compressed and optimized, we should be able to consume a few pages before reaching quota errors, depending on how quota-heavy the pages are. -
Scheduled reports to be sent during hours with less to no manual consumption
Ideally, the report is scheduled to be sent during hours when there's no manual consumption of the GA4 Looker Studio dashboard, in order to avoid the quota limit. -
Be mindful of GA4 Looker Studio dashboard consumption among your team.
Avoid increased quota usage by keeping the 1,750 tokens per hour top of mind. Essentially, restrict access to the key people that need to review your data on a regular basis.
While this is certainly not the best news, we’re proud that we are still able to use Looker Studio to help you dive deeper into your metrics, just simply not as robustly as before the quotas were announced and implemented.
If you’d like to have our team help you to better understand the options that are available, please reach out to your account manager or contact support@rebelmouse.com today.
