Google services and scopes

DP Team -

Data Pipelines allows you to access your data held by Google such as Google Sheets or Google Analytics in multiple ways.

You can give Data Pipelines access to your data in an incremental way. You will notice that each time you connect your Data Pipelines account to a Google service (eg. Google Analytics), Google will tell you exactly what 'scopes' you are permitting access to. We will only request the minimum level of access for each type of connection.

The below example shows the Google scopes for connecting Google Analytics. Since this is a read-only connection, the scope only permits us to 'see and download data'. This is enough to enable us to process your GA data for you.

Scopes required to access and process your Google Analytics data

Contrast the above with scopes required for Google Sheets. The level of access has to be higher because the connection allows reading as well as writing.

Scopes required to access and process your Google Sheets data

Disconnecting Google services

Connecting your Google services this way is convenient and quick. There is, however, one pitfall you will need to watch out for when you connect more than one service.

The process of adding scopes as described above is the standard way of providing access to Google services. It is called incremental authorization. At the time of writing, there is no way to remove scopes incrementally. What this means is that if you disconnect your Data Pipelines account from Google Sheets (by going to Connections and clicking 'Disconnect'), if you also have a Google Analytics connection then that too will be disconnected. This behaviour is controlled by Google and currently there is no way around it.

There is a warning message that explains the above that pops up when you are about to disconnect a service but if you want to make absolutely sure that a Google Analytics account does not get accidentally disconnected by someone disconnecting Google Sheets then you may want to consider connecting by using a Google Service Account. This involves a bit more work than just clicking a button but it is fairly simple and we provide a step by step tutorial how to do it. It ensures that your connections are completely separate from each other.