Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
If you run paid search campaigns, this week just got urgent. Google has begun deleting hourly, daily, and weekly reporting data older than 37 months, with the policy taking effect from 1 June 2026. This is what needs to be done over the coming days.
What’s Actually Changing and What Isn’t
It’s easy to panic, so let’s be precise. Granular reporting data, including hourly, daily, and weekly figures, will now only be retained for 37 months, while monthly, quarterly, and annual data remains accessible for 11 years. Once data passes its retention window, it will no longer be accessible through the Google Ads interface or APIs – meaning your dashboards, automated reports, and data warehouse pipelines could all be affected. If your agency holds years of campaign history for benchmarking or client reviews, that granular layer is now gone unless you already exported it.
Why This Hits Agencies the Hardest
For those of us managing multiple client accounts, the operational risk here is significant. Organisations running complex omnichannel reporting by blending data from multiple Google APIs need to audit their extraction workflows carefully to avoid serving clients incomplete performance dashboards. Think about seasonal trend analysis, day-of-week performance benchmarking, or long-term A/B test comparisons; all that granular intelligence becomes inaccessible without proactive data management.
Three Actions to Take This Week
Don’t wait for a client to ask why their historical chart has gaps. First, export all hourly, daily, and weekly data beyond 37 months immediately. Second, review any automated reporting workflows to confirm whether they store historical data independently or only query Google Ads on demand. The latter will now fail silently. Third, consider moving to a third-party data warehouse solution to ensure long-term retention sits outside Google’s control entirely.
