What this feature is for
NextRise’s numbers accumulate from the day you install the tracking tag. If you already use GA4, you can fill in the period before you installed the tag from GA4, so that period-over-period and year-over-year comparisons are available from day one.
- It’s optional. Even if you skip it, the numbers from the day you installed the tag onward are correct.
- It’s one time only. You can import up to “the day before you installed the tag”; after that, everything runs on the tracking tag alone. You can disconnect GA4 afterward.
- Only daily totals are imported. No per-visitor data is fetched.
Steps
- Install the tracking tag first. The end of the import is set to “the day before the first tracking event”, so doing it in the other order leaves a gap.
- Open the “If you use GA4…” banner at the top of the dashboard, or Manage sites → Settings → Import history from GA4.
- Connect with your Google account and choose one GA4 property.
- Press Import history. It proceeds one dimension at a time, in the order KPIs → Acquisition → Pages → Users → Products → Funnel. Don’t close the screen until it finishes. If it stops partway, you can resume with [Resume import].
Once the import finishes, it’s reflected in the dashboard and improvement cards.
What is imported and what isn’t
| Imported | Not imported |
|---|---|
| Daily sessions, users, new users, engagement rate, purchases, and revenue | Per-visitor data |
| Breakdowns by source, page, landing page, device, country, and so on (the top N; the rest is grouped as “(other)”) | Combinations of breakdowns (for example, mobile × source) |
| Per-product views and revenue (top N) | Real-user speed |
| Each stage of the purchase funnel (sessions that reached it) | By hour of day |
Because of this, breakdowns for the imported period aren’t available while a filter (segment) is applied, since we don’t hold combinations of breakdowns.
Things to know
- Only one property, and it can’t be changed later. To change it, add the site again.
- GA4 counts things slightly differently from NextRise. In a period that spans the boundary, GA4-sourced days and self-tracked days are mixed, so also see When numbers don’t match.
- If you have connected order data (WooCommerce / Shopify), revenue, transactions, and AOV come from orders even for the imported period. On days where orders can be pulled, those numbers are built from orders, not from GA4.