Hello,
I see the retention is 14 months on visitor data or 25 on enterprise. I’m not sure how to read this.
Is this only customer sensitive data or also simple stuff like overall page views, events, goals etcetera?
Hi @WWNL,
all data prior to this 14 month period will be removed. Mentioned 25 months for enterprise can be of course further adjusted individually.
If you’d like to keep some basic data points, I’d suggest using integration with BI tools like Tableau, Power BI or Data Studio, so that the general overview is not lost because of the retention period.
That’s a bummer. Why has there been chosen for such short period of time? In my mind it doesn’t make sense for a analytic solution.
If you would go enterprise, does extending the data behind 25 months bring additional costs? Are there any user stories how other companies keep and store their data? Coming from GA I’m quite used to be able to go back for years and years. Something I quite often do.
Google analytics defaults to 2 months with the ability to change it to 14 months.
If you’re referring to the legacy version of GA, you have to keep in mind that it’ll be disabled mid next year.
In our enterprise plans, it’s always discussed individually. The general answer would be yes because higher retention means more disk space and computing power to calculate reports.
Some of the companies set up raw data exports and keep all the raw data in their data warehouses.
Google’s retention for event and user level data is short, that’s true. But the aggregated data will be stored, so there we do have some overview data for longer periods, too.
So with Piwik PRO, we then probably need to write our own API scripts to pull the data to Google Sheets 
Integration with e.g. Data Studio doesn’t help much as it uses API to fetch data. If the data is not available in the data source anymore, there will be no backup unless we create another data source ourselves.
For me, this isn’t really a problem. Unfortunately, many stakeholders expect to have longer periods of data available.
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I had wrongly assumed that the data retention in Piwik PRO works like the data retention in GA4, in which the aggregated reports would still be available beyond the 14-month period.
I agree with @Mikko_Piippo here, I can see more than one client that will definitely not be pleased to have to subscribe to the Enterprise plan for > 10,000€ / year if they want to have a longer retention period, and even then they only get 25 months!
I know that the older the data the less useful it is, but clients do like to hoard it for as long as they can for some reason. In my opinion there should at least be an option to have a larger retention period with the Core plan, to cover your storage costs.
With the free version of GA4 you get a virtually unlimited data retention for standard reports, so I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see clients go back to GA4 because of this limitation in Piwik PRO, especially now that GA4 is finally getting its act together.
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