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Overview
As a Google Analytics administrator or editor, you can set up user-provided data collection to send your consented, first-party data from your website to Google Analytics. The data you send is then matched with other Google data in a privacy-safe way to improve the accuracy of your measurement data and power enhanced Analytics capabilities.
If you are sending data from a website, you have the option to implement user-provided data collection using a secure one-way hashing algorithm called SHA256 to hash the data before sending it to Google, or you can rely on the feature to use the SHA256 hashing algorithm on the user-provided data before sending it to Google.
If you implement user-provided data collection through Measurement Protocol, you must use SHA256 to hash the data before sending it to Google.
This feature is not available for properties in the “Health” industry category.
Benefits
User-provided data collection allows you to future-proof your setup so that it's not dependent on third-party cookies, which are going away. It also enables these features and functionality:
Customer match
User-provided data collection enables customer match support for Google Analytics 4 audiences exported to your linked Google advertising products. This helps maximize coverage for remarketing efforts, ensuring that your campaigns reach the most relevant audiences.
The integration matches your consented, hashed customer data with Google data to increase your addressable audiences when other user identifiers are not available.
Enhanced conversions
User-provided data collection enables enhanced conversions support for Google Analytics 4 conversions. Enhanced conversions allows Google Analytics to produce a more complete picture of cross-device and conversion measurement and attribution using first-party data.
The integration matches your consented, hashed customer data with Google data to fill in gaps for Google Ads ad interactions that may be unobservable when cookies or other user identifiers are not available. It then uses this more holistic view to improve conversion modeling, bid optimization, and provide an improved view of cross-channel performance in GA4 and Google Ads reports.
Demographics and Interests
User-provided-data collection provides demographic and interest reporting based on first-party data and consented Google signed-in user data, helping to future-proof measurement without depending on third-party cookies.
Before you begin
Feature considerations for user-provided data collection
To send consented, first-party data from your website using user-provided data collection, you must link your Google Analytics property to your Google Ads account. Below are key considerations for user-provided data collection:
- Managing user-provided data in property settings: Be aware that acknowledging the feature policy is permanent. However, you can uncheck the checkbox. When you uncheck the checkbox, we won’t process user-provided data in the Google Analytics property. Your Google tag may still collect user provided data, but that data won’t be transmitted to your Google Analytics property with the checkbox unchecked. You can disallow user-provided data collection from your tag or through Google tag settings under “Allow user provided data capabilities”.
- Modeling and attribution availability: To ensure data accuracy, improvements to models and attribution by enhanced conversion may take up to one month to appear in your Google Analytics and Google Ads reports and bidding.
- Cross-device remarketing: If your property has audiences, audience membership for audiences based on cross-device user interactions may decrease. This is because signed-in user data (User-ID) is separate from signed-out user data. Remarketing to these audiences on other devices may be impacted. Allowing Google signals can help you mitigate this.
- Demographics and interests: Data for users with a User-ID will be derived from user-provided data from signed-in users, instead of cookie and device identifiers.
- Traffic attribution: Adopting user-provided data can sometimes over-attribute traffic to “direct”, especially for websites with frequent user login and logout activity. This happens because complete first-party data identifiers may not be available across all sessions. Enhancements are in development to improve identifier processing and utilization in Google Analytics, including client_ids, to better link user journeys for accurate attribution.
- Measurement protocol: If you’re using Measurement Protocol, you must send both the User-ID and user-provided data after activating the feature. Follow all best practices detailed in Send user-provided data with User-ID using the Measurement Protocol.
Set up user-provided data collection
- Activate user-provided data collection.
When you activate user-provided data collection, Google Analytics can collect user-provided data from all the data streams in the Google Analytics property and export that data to your linked advertising accounts.
- In Admin, under Data collection and modification, click Data collection
Note: The previous link opens to the last Analytics property you accessed. You can change the property using the property selector. You must be an Editor or above at the property level to activate user-provided data collection.
- In User-provided data collection, click Turn on.
- (Optional) Select Collect automatically detected user-provided data to enable Google Analytics to detect user-provided data on your website automatically.
If you select this option, you must also enable automatic collection in the Google tag. You can update this setting after you turn on user-provided data collection. If you enable the manual or code method, Analytics will automatically detect user-provided data only if the manual or code method doesn't identify user-provided data. - Review the User-provided data policy, then click Turn on.
- In Admin, under Data collection and modification, click Data collection
- Identify and configure collection of user-provided data on your website through one of these options:
Implementation option Details gtag.js If you currently use gtag.js to collect data from your website, you should follow the instructions for gtag.js to make slight adjustments to your configuration to collect user-provided data. Learn about the gtag.js implementation Google Tag Manager If you currently use Google Tag Manager to collect data from your website, you should follow the instructions for Tag Manager to update your container with variables that collect user-provided data. Learn about the Tag Manager implementation Measurement Protocol If you want to collect user-provided data from an offline interaction, you can set up user-provided data collection using Measurement Protocol. After activating user-provided data, it’s recommended to send both user data and the User-ID. Learn about the Measurement Protocol implementation
Understanding when to implement the User-ID feature
User-provided data can be used with and without the user-ID feature.The User-ID feature uses your own unique user identifiers (which must be a different identifier from the ones used in user-provided data collection) that are created and managed by you for each user.
For some websites, implementing the User-ID feature may not be possible. But for other websites, such as ecommerce sites, we recommend that you set up the User-ID feature along with user-provided data collection to provide the most accurate user reporting in Analytics.
If you send user-provided data without also sending user IDs, collected user-provided data will be pseudonymized and used to recognize unique users for user deduplication and reporting purposes. When multiple types of user-provided data are provided, Analytics will prioritize in the following order: email, phone, name and address. Note that if user IDs are later provided for users that were previously measured with only user-provided data (no user ID), Analytics will recognize these as separate users for reporting purposes.
Sharing more than one field
You can include one or more fields from your site. By including more than one field, you increase the likelihood of a customer match and of attributing the conversion.
If you would only like to provide one field, we recommend sending email; however, the address and phone fields can also be helpful in improving the likelihood of matches.
Disabling user-provided data collection
While acknowledging the feature policy is permanent, you can stop collecting user-provided data in Analytics these ways:
- Toggling off User-provided data collection in your Google Analytics implementation via Admin > Data Settings > Data collection will turn off the ingestion and processing of user-provided data in your property.
- Toggling off User-provided data collection in your Tagging or Tag Manager implementation will stop the Google tag from sending user-provided data to your Analytics property. Additionally, if you send user-provided data to Analytics with Measurement Protocol, you’ll want to update your implementation to stop including user-provided data.
Alternatively, if you are unable to modify the data being sent to Analytics, but you want to stop using the feature in reporting, you can disable Blended reporting in the Reporting Identity settings and therefore only use data from the anonymous identity space.