GA4 Quota Limits. Why your Looker Studio Reports Are Broken
By the power of Google magic, they’ve managed to transform your beautiful GA4 reports in Looker Studio into this…
Well, actually more like this….
In this article, I’ll explain why it’s happening and talk about some solutions for solving the issue.
Wow Google!
You’ve really done it this time. In one fell swoop, you’ve managed to destroy thousands upon thousands of reports and dashboards containing GA4 data which probably represents decades, if not centuries, of combined hours of analysts’ work around the globe.
If you’re reading this article, it’s probably because you’ve recently opened up your GA4 reports in Looker Studio and got this error message:
“Exhausted concurrent request quota. Please send fewer requests concurrently. For example, wait for requests to finish before sending more. Click here to learn more about request quotas or contact Google Analytics Support for more information.”
GA4 Quota Limits
So let me start by explaining why this error is occurring. If you click on the link in the error message you get taken to a page which sets out the quota limits when working with the GA4 API. The 2 rows that are causing this problem are “Core Tokens Per Project Per Property Per Hour” and “Core Concurrent Requests Per Property” with the main culprit being the latter which is set to 10.
A request is simply Looker Studio asking the GA4 API for some data. When you load your report in Looker Studio, a request is sent concurrently for every single widget containing a query (the charts, graphs and tables). In some cases, more than one request is sent per widget (e.g. for the query result and the list of values for a chart legend).
So if your report contains more than 10 widgets or requests, you’ll fall foul of this quota limit. This is probably the majority of dedicated GA4 reports.
And, even if your report doesn’t send 10 or more concurrent requests, you could then fall foul of the second limit of 1250 Core Tokens Per Project Per Property Per Hour. Each widget query, or request, also represents a different number of tokens.
On this same page, Google explains that:
Tokens are calculated with each request depending upon the request's complexity to complete. Most requests will charge 10 or fewer tokens.
So if you have a dashboard that contains 10 widgets that, on average represent 8 tokens each, 80 tokens are used when you simply load the dashboard. Apply a filter to the report, another 80. So you can see how it might be fairly easy to reach the token limit.
As you can imagine, people are up in arms (to use a polite expression) about these new changes to quota limits. There’s a lot of anger out there towards Google right now and it’s easy to understand why. One day your reports work fine and the next they’re broken with no easy fix. But what are the fixes suggested by Google and how practical are they?
GA4 Quota Limit Fixes
The first of Google’s suggested fixes is:
Please send fewer requests concurrently. For example, wait for requests to finish before sending more.
The thing is, there’s no way of configuring Looker Studio to send requests contained in reports in batches. So basically, you have to reduce the number of requests to below 10 for any given page of a report.
In practical terms, this would mean splitting up the charts in your current dashboard over multiple pages. Not ideal and kind of defeats the object of a dashboard.
If you thought that first suggested fix was bad, just take a look at this troubleshooting guide Google has put together. Here’s what they suggest:
Reduce the traffic to the report. Consider sharing the report with fewer people, and don't embed the report in a high-traffic website.
They’ve got to be joking, right? Is it April first?
Reduce the number of charts on each page.
We’ve just talked about that.
This next one makes a bit more sense:
Extract the Google Analytics 4 data and use the extracted data instead of the Google Analytics 4 data source.
So I think they’re talking about the Extract Data connector in Looker Studio that allows you to extract raw data from data sources are store it on Google’s servers instead of sending requests to the GA4 API.
But this connector has limits too. Firstly, you can only store up to 100Mb of data which may sound like a lot but it quickly adds up if you want to show historical data.
Then, and this is not so much of a limit in most cases, the data will only update upon a scheduled automatic refresh. The most frequent level of refresh is daily. So, if your report viewers are used to seeing constantly updating data, you’ll need to “manage expectations”.
The next suggestion is what I think a lot of people will turn to:
Export your Analytics data to BigQuery, then use the BigQuery connector to visualize that data in Looker Studio.
If you click the link, there is an article explaining how to set this up but, for A LOT of Looker Studio users, this will simply be way too complicated and probably lead to them finding a new solution for the GA reporting needs.
The whole point of Looker Studio is, for the most part, self-service BI. Putting data in the hands of the business user and making analytics and business intelligence accessible to non-technical users. Forcing them to get their hands dirty in BigQuery defeats this point.
Another suggestion is to upgrade to Analytics 360. Great, how much is that? Oh, it starts at $50,000 per year. Right. Next.
Finally, “Consider using a partner connector.” At the time of recording, there are currently 33 partner connectors offering Google Analytics data. I haven’t tried them all but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, none of them are free. So your existing free reports now aren’t.
You might be wondering, as I am, what they’ve been smoking over there at Google to introduce such an update without any prior warning. Effectively breaking everyone’s GA4 reports.
Well, I think that good (or at least better) news is on the way. Just a few hours ago, on the Looker Studio help pages, Rick E from Google posted an update on their plans to address the GA4 quota limit issue.
Apparently, the plan has 2 components:
1) Optimizing how Looker Studio retries queries to mitigate the impact of the concurrent requests per property quota limit.
2) Showing you the amount of quota tokens consumed by report components and the amount of tokens remaining for the report so that you can optimize your charts and reports.
This work is underway, and we will update the community when these improvements are available.
My thoughts?
Personally, I think we’re far from seeing the end of this story. There will probably be a few more twists, turns and u-turns to come. I’ll be sure to keep you updated so don’t forget to subscribe and hit that bell so that you get notified when I post new uploads.
If you’ve got to the end of this video and you still have no idea what I’m talking about or what Looker Studio even is, check out this video here for a 15-minute getting started tutorial or check out my full 5-hour course.