Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA4) and BigQuery for marketing and audience insights

Google Cloud works with Google Analytics to help businesses become more data-driven. Bringing Google Analytics data into BigQuery can help you reveal business insights across more data and increase time to value.

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Overview

Familiar data tools to supercharge your marketing

If you're looking for a way to bring more data to your marketing and make data-driven decisions about your business, leveraging Google Analytics and BigQuery together with Looker Studio is a great place to start. These familiar tools work together with built-in integrations to make it easy to bring your data together for analysis, audience segmentation, and sharing insights.

What is the difference between GA4 and Google Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) properties will replace Universal Analytics properties on July 1, 2023. This means Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new data, so you will not be able to process new data or show updated reports and metrics about your app or website performance after that date. Google Analytics 4 properties will be the only fully functional version of Google Analytics after July 1, 2023. Universal Analytics 360 properties will continue to process new data until July 1, 2024.

Why should you export Google Analytics data into BigQuery?

You can export all event data from Google Analytics properties to BigQuery for free with the BigQuery Export, which resides in Google Analytics (GA4). In BigQuery, you can import external data from other sources, like CRM data, and combine it with your Google Analytics data, using SQL-like syntax to query the data for advanced reporting beyond sampling and quota limits. This enables you to build audience segments, explore custom traffic attribution, and build simple ML models for reporting and audiences.

How do you set up the Google Analytics BigQuery Export?

First, you'll need to create a new Google Cloud project and enable BigQuery. Then you'll need to prepare your project for BigQuery Export. If this is your first time getting started, you can link Google Analytics to the BigQuery sandbox, which is free and doesn't require a credit card to get started (sandbox limits apply). If your organization already has existing BigQuery pipelines, you can also link to your existing BigQuery project. Finally, you'll link BigQuery to Google Analytics properties.

Can BigQuery bring Google Analytics data into Looker Studio?

Organizations can connect Google Analytics data directly into Looker Studio to build reports and dashboards that can be shared across teams. (Looker Studio reports connected to Google Analytics data are subject to Google Analytics Data API quotas). The BigQuery export feature to Looker Studio provides capabilities beyond the Google Analytics Data API without the worry about dealing with high cardinality, while allowing you to get an accurate picture of your marketing data without limitations from the API.

What is BigQuery?

BigQuery is a cloud-based data warehouse that can store and analyze large amounts of data. You can use BigQuery to store data from Google Analytics, as well as other sources, such as your website's logs and your CRM system. This data can be used to run complex queries and identify trends that you might not be able to see with Google Analytics alone.

What is the BigQuery sandbox?

The BigQuery sandbox lets you explore BigQuery capabilities at no cost to confirm whether BigQuery fits your needs. The sandbox lets you experience BigQuery and the Google Cloud console without providing a credit card, creating a billing account, or enabling billing for your project.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a measurement platform that provides a detailed understanding of your customers across devices and platforms free of charge. You can use Google Analytics to measure your website or app's performance, make data-driven decisions based on how customers interact across your sites and apps, and improve your marketing ROI.

What is Looker Studio?

Looker Studio is a free tool used to power your data with interactive dashboards and beautiful reports that inspire smarter business decisions. Easily access a wide variety of data with Looker Studio’s built-in connectors that make it easy to bring in data from BigQuery and Google Analytics 4. These enable you to build and share reports and dashboards across your stakeholders and collaborate in real time across a single source of truth.

How It Works

Connect Google Analytics data to BigQuery with the BigQuery Export, now free to all GA4 users, to quickly query all of your Google Analytics data and build audience segments.

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Watch how to use the BigQuery Export in GA4

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