Dotwave Import from Google Analytics (GA4)
Google Analytics 4 holds the behavioral picture of your product or site — sessions, conversions, traffic sources, engagement. Dotwave connects to a GA4 property, lets you assemble a report from dimensions and metrics, and imports the result as a clean, typed dataset you can join with anything else in your workspace.
Requirements
Before you can import, three things must be in place:
- A GA4 property — the newer Google Analytics data model. Universal Analytics properties are not supported.
- A service account with read access to that property, added under the property's Property Access Management.
- A one-time connection setup. Contact support to configure the service-account connection to your GA4 property; once it is in place, imports run without further setup.
What you can import
A GA4 import is essentially a report you design in Dotwave. You choose the dimensions (the ways you want to slice the data — for example date, country, session source, landing page) and the metrics (the numbers you want measured — for example sessions, total users, conversions, average engagement time). Dotwave runs that report against the GA4 Data API and imports the returned rows as a dataset. Each dimension becomes a column you can group and filter by, and each metric becomes a numeric column ready for aggregation and charting.
Keep dimension + metric combinations under 10 columns for best results. GA4's API limits some combinations.
How to import
From the Data sources page, click Add data source and choose Google Analytics.
Pick the GA4 property you want to report on from the list of properties the service account can access.
Add the dimensions that define your rows and the metrics that fill them. Stay under about ten total columns to avoid API restrictions.
Define the reporting window — a fixed start and end date, or a rolling window such as the last 30 days.
Dotwave runs the report and creates a dataset from the returned rows. From there it behaves like any other Dotwave dataset.
Working with GA4 data in Dotwave
GA4 reports are pre-aggregated by the dimensions you chose, so the imported dataset is already grouped — one row per unique combination of dimension values. If you need a finer breakdown later, run a new import with additional dimensions rather than trying to disaggregate after the fact. Date dimensions import as strings in GA4's YYYYMMDD form; use Dotwave's cleaning tools to convert them to proper dates if you want time-series charts to sort and bucket correctly.
GA4 applies data thresholding and, on some properties, sampling for large date ranges. If totals look slightly lower than expected, narrow the date range or reduce the number of high-cardinality dimensions to reduce the chance of thresholded rows being withheld.