Why Move GA4 Data to BigQuery?

Google is promoting the use of BigQuery with GA4. 

On it’s website Google stated that-

“You can export all of your raw events from Google Analytics 4 properties (including sub-properties and roll-up properties) to BigQuery, and then use an SQL-like syntax to query that data.”

So what are the benefits of using BigQuery with GA4:

1. You own your data

If you have migrated from Google's Universal Analytics (UA) you might have noticed that by the end of the year you will not have access to your historical data. That is because the hosting of that data is owned by Google and they can turn it off as they have decided to do for UA. Migrating your data to BigQuery means you own the data and you get to choose how long to store it for.

2. You can access the raw data

For those of you using the free version of Google Analytics (UA) you will understand that your data is sampled. The same is true of GA4. By migrating to GA4 you get access to the raw data. 

Another benefit of having the raw data is that in order to comply with GDPR and CCPA, GA4 applies an unspecified data threshold to prevent someone from inferring the identity of individual users. By exporting the data to BigQuery, you won’t have that issue as you have access to the raw data and can drill down to individual events.

Finally, as the data is in a database, you can run SQL like queries to extract data like a fuller list of organic keywords, or wildcard searches. 

3.You can do advanced analytics on the data

Once you have the data in BigQuery you can manipulate it however you want. This means that you can also manipulate the data so that you can run advanced analytics on the data such as predictive models, segmentation, etc. 

Using GA4 data in BigQuery we have built a tool that can automatically create audience segments* from your actual website behavioural data using unsupervised machine learning. If you always wanted to experiment with a bit of data science with digital data, now you can.

4.Integration with other data sources is much easier

As BigQuery is a cloud database, it means that it can also connect to, store and process data from other data sources. This means that you can also import data from your martech and adtech and then analyse in one place with your website and App data to create more comprehensive dashboards.

The above is not a comprehensive list, but gives you an idea of the benefits of migrating data to BigQuery. If you want to know more about how to export GA4 to BigQuery then get in touch with us at hello@bedatasolutions.com