TraceImport and export
Bring historical daily traffic into Trace from Google Analytics 4 or a CSV file, and export your daily totals.
Settings → Import brings historical traffic into Trace from Google Analytics 4 or a CSV file, and lets you export your daily totals. It's available to Editors and above.
Imported data is stored as daily totals — visitors, visits, pageviews, bounces and visit duration per day. It fills in your headline stats and chart for the days before the site started tracking with Trace. Breakdowns (pages, sources, countries, devices) aren't imported.
Import from Google Analytics
- Click Import from Google Analytics and sign in with a Google account that can read the GA4 property.
- If Trace can't pick the property for this site automatically, choose it from the Property list and click Use this property.
- Click Import from Google Analytics in the Google Analytics 4 card. Trace pulls the daily users, pageviews, sessions, bounces and engagement time for every day before the site started tracking.
Use Reconnect Google Analytics if access is revoked. Disconnect removes the Google connection only — imported days stay until you delete them.
Import from CSV
Upload a visitors CSV — for example visitors.csv from another analytics tool's dashboard export, or an imported_visitors_*.csv file from a full backup — under Import from CSV, then click Import from CSV.
The file needs a header row with at least a date and a visitors column. Extra columns are fine. Header names ignore case, and spaces and hyphens count as underscores.
| What's stored | Accepted column names and formats |
|---|---|
| Date | date, as YYYY-MM-DD, YYYYMMDD or YYYY/MM/DD |
| Visitors | visitors, unique_visitors |
| Pageviews | pageviews, page_views, total_pageviews (defaults to visitors if missing) |
| Visits | visits, total_visits, sessions |
| Bounces | bounces |
| Bounce rate | bounce_rate (0–1 or 0–100); otherwise worked out from bounces ÷ visits |
| Visit duration | visit_duration, visit_duration_seconds — in seconds, m:ss, h:mm:ss or 1h 2m 3s |
Visit duration is read as a daily total when the file also has visits or bounces columns, and as a per-visit average otherwise.
- The maximum file size is 10 MB.
- Re-uploading a CSV with the same dates overwrites those days. If one file has the same date twice, the first row is used.
- Breakdown files are rejected. Pages, sources, devices, locations and similar breakdown exports aren't stored — upload the visitors file, not the whole export.
What gets skipped
So nothing is counted twice:
- Imported days on or after the site's first tracked pageview are skipped.
- Future dates are skipped.
- A Google Analytics import skips days already covered by a CSV import.
After each import the tab tells you how many days were skipped and why.
What shows on the dashboard
For date ranges that include imported days, these numbers combine imported and live data:
- Unique visitors, total visits and total pageviews
- Bounce rate and visit duration (weighted by visits)
- The main chart, at day, week or month granularity
A notice appears when imported data is in range. Hide imported data turns it off for that view (it adds ?imported=0 to the URL); nothing is deleted.
Imported data is left out when:
- a filter is applied (source, country, page, goal, …) — there are no imported breakdowns to filter;
- the chart is hourly — imports are daily totals.
Pages, sources, countries, devices, goals, funnels and realtime visitors always use live data only.
Export
Export visitors CSV downloads a file with the columns date,visitors,pageviews,bounces,visits,visit_duration: your live daily totals, plus imported days that don't overlap them. You can import that file into another site, or keep it as a backup.
Delete imported data
Delete imported data removes every imported day for the site. Live tracking isn't touched, and you can import again any time.
FAQ
I imported a file and the dashboard still looks empty
Check the date range — imported history usually sits before you installed the script, so "Last 30 days" won't show it. Switch to All time or a custom range that covers the imported dates. Also check the import result: overlapping days are skipped on purpose.
Will this inflate today's numbers?
No. Days the site has already been tracking are never added from an import.