Google Analytics New vs Returning

Hi lherbert501 

Issue isn’t with Power BI— it’s with Google Analytics itself.
When Power BI’s Google Analytics connector queries data, it uses GA’s API. That API does not include a pre‑calculated “Returning Users” metric— it only returns “New Users” and “Total Users.”
GA4 does expose a dimension (New/Returning), but no direct count for “Returning Users” through the API. Some tools approximate it as Total – New, but this isn’t always accurate (due to cookie behaviour, thresholds, sampling, etc.).
To get a reliable Returning Users metric in Power BI, you’ll need to either use a third‑party connector that calculates it for you (e.g. Coupler.io, Windsor.ai), or pull GA4 data into BigQuery and compute it yourself.
This isn’t a bug in Power BI—it’s simply a limitation of the data source.

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