Linking BigQuery and GA4 is a powerful combination for several reasons:
- Access to raw data: When you link GA4 with BigQuery, you can export raw, unsampled data from GA4 into BigQuery, giving you more flexibility and control over your data. This allows you to analyze and manipulate the data in ways impossible within GA4 itself.
- Advanced analysis capabilities: BigQuery can quickly and efficiently handle large volumes of data quickly and efficiently. It uses SQL for data analysis, and also you can take advantage of advanced analytics tools and techniques, such as machine learning and predictive analytics.
- Customization: BigQuery allows you to create custom data sets and reports that meet your business needs. Combining GA4 data with other data sources can give you a more comprehensive understanding of your business and customers.
- Since both are Google products BigQuery and Looker Studio have an extremely fast connection. That means you can create and update reports in seconds.
Although it may seem unnecessary initially, this data may come in handy in the future. Setting up BigQuery and GA4 linking ASAP is important because it does not add data retroactively.
To do this, we need to be logged in under the email, which has both the BigQuery project and GA4 property shared with admin credentials.
Instructions:
- Admin > Property > BigQuery linking > Link
- Link to the BigQuery project by project ID. If we don’t have a BQ project, we’ll create one.
- We set the location – if your location is EU, select EU to store the data. It can not be changed later.
- Set the frequency – I recommend ticking only daily. This will export a table from GA4 to BQ every day. Streaming can only be set up if you have set up billing in Google Cloud Platform
You will have the data in BQ within 24 hours.
Price:
BQ is not free. Free tier: 10GB storage + 1TB query processing per month, then billed at $0.04/GB
Based on our experience, an e-commerce client with 200k visits and 5000 orders per day needs around 100-150MB to store data of one day. So even if you exceed the free tier, it will cost you $1-2 monthly.
