MeasureFest October 2022: Why GA4 means you need to get on board with BigQuery

This is my first time speaking at any analyics conference, let alone MeasureFest, and I’m looking forward to sharing my passion for SQL and BigQuery. I’ve been a data analyst for over 10 years, I’ve used SQL with Oracle, Microsoft and now Google BigQuery, and I can honestly say that Google has been my favourite so far! They are constantly thinking of new ways to improve the user experience, and the speed of the code is amazing. Plus they have a suite of products which have been made to speak to one another with ease.

I love extracting data using SQL, the control you have is amazing. Lots of people can code SQL to extract data, but only the best ones will be checking their outputs and ensuring the data you are looking at is correct. All you need to get started is a little imagination for what you want to extract and how you are going to use that data, a question to ask your data is a good start. From there it’s just a case of building up your code and testing along the way. This article I wrote will help with what you should think about when testing your SQL code.

Before you start using BigQuery with your GA4 data, you’ll need to get the exports all set up. Here’s a guide I wrote on how to do it step by step:

Here’s some resources related to the talk to help get started and utilising BigQuery now:

• How much it costs – https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
• Official documentation and guides from Google – https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs
• Great guides and code snippets to get started – https://www.ga4bigquery.com/

And here’s some handy free resources for learning SQL (and beyond):

• https://developers.google.com/analytics/bigquery/basic-queries
• https://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp
• https://www.kaggle.com/learn

For other people to follow, podcasts to listen to, newsletters to subscribe to, websites to visit, and other things that we recommend, see our full recommended list that we pulled together.

Slides

Below are my slides from my MeasureFest talk. Here is the link to Google Slides in case that doesn’t work.

Recording