Thresholding applied in Google Analytics 4. What does it mean?

Updated: September 7th, 2025

Here’s something that you might often face in Google Analytics 4. You open a report and see an orange exclamation mark at the top of the report. You click it and see this warning: “Google Analytics has applied thresholding to one or more cards in this report and will only display the data in the cards when the data meets the minimum aggregation thresholds.”

How can that be? The report is unsampled, but that “threshold” sounds like sampling, where you get only a portion of the data you captured.

In this blog post, I will explain thresholding and what to do about it.

What is causing this?

This is related to the data coming from Google Signals, which is disabled by default.

Why would you want to enable Google Signals in the first place? There are at least two reasons. But first, let’s quickly learn what Google Signals is in general.

Google Signals enables the tracking of users across devices and platforms. When enabled, Google Signals collects data from users who have signed in to a Google account and have enabled the feature in their Google Account settings. This data is then used to provide insights into your audience’s demographics (age, gender) and interests. You can learn more about it here.

If Google Signals is active, your GA4 property will collect more data and unlock certain features. That’s where we come to at least two reasons why people might want to enable Google Signals:

• It will start populating demographic data in GA4
• It lets you reuse Google Analytics audiences as retargeting audiences in Google Ads (thus, you can show more targetted ads to them)

But together with that, we get one caveat: thresholding.

What is the impact of Thresholding in Google Analytics 4?

If you are looking at the report that contains data related to Google Signals (age, gender, interest), Google Analytics will hide rows in the reports with small user numbers). I don’t know the exact number, but it looks like something below 50 users/events per row.

Previously, any report could be affected by Thresholding. Now, only reports with the following dimensions are affected:

• age
• gender
• interest

Why is Google doing this?

Officially, they say this is to prevent us (GA users) from identifying individual users based on the data that Google Signals adds to our reports (e.g., age, gender, etc.).

Think of thresholding like a privacy filter at a small gathering. If you asked ‘Show me all the red-haired people who love pineapple pizza’, and there’s only one such person at the gathering, announcing that person’s presence (and their specific combination of traits) could make them easily identifiable.

To protect their privacy, Google Analytics might respond, ‘Sorry, I can’t show you groups that small for that specific combination.

Similarly, if your report tries to show, for example, ‘Females, aged 25-34, from a small town, interested in knitting, who visited a specific page’, and the count is very low (e.g., less than 50 users), GA4 might hide that specific row. It’s not that the data doesn’t exist; it’s just not being shown to protect the privacy of that small group of users.

What can you do about it?

Not much. You have three options:

• Remove age, gender, and interest dimensions from the report
• Keep those dimensions and accept the fact that Thresholding is applied
• Remove user-related metrics from the report

Note: You might find other articles online suggesting changing the GA4 reporting identity to device-based or not enabling Google Signals at all. That does not work anymore because, at one point, Google changed how it uses and processes user data.

The first two bullet points above are pretty self-explanatory. Let me elaborate on the third one.

A report without user metrics will not be thresholded

Thresholding is also looking at what metrics you use in the report. If the report does not include user metrics (e.g., Total users, Active users, Users, event count per user, etc.), Thresholding will not be applied to that report.

So if it makes sense and is possible in your situation, you can try to remove the user metric(s) from the report and still see other numbers (even if your reporting identity is not device-based).

Thresholding applied in Google Analytics 4: Final words

Data thresholding in Google Analytics 4 is not sampling. Those are different things. Thresholding is applied to a report that uses dimensions related to Google Signals:

• Age
• Gender
• Interest

Because of thresholding, rows with fewer than ~50 users will be hidden. Your options here are:

• to not use those dimensions
• accept the fact that some reports can be thresholded
• remove user-related metrics (such as Total users) from the report

None of these “options” are good. But at least thresholding is not as widespread now as it was before. Before February 2024, most of the GA4 reports were thresholded (even if they were not using those three specific dimensions).