10 reasons to export your GA4 data to BigQuery

Lace Rogers•25 November 2021•3 min read
10 reasons to export your GA4 data to BigQuery

At Measurelab we love BigQuery and Google Analytics. It’s our ‘thing’. We're continually looking at ways to use these tools to make our analysis and reporting even better.

Luckily, Google has made this super-easy by providing all Google Analytics 4 properties with a way to export daily and real-time data into BigQuery - free. The storage of this data is cheap as chips and allows you to enrich and leverage your web and app data to build data-driven solutions and optimisations. A winner all round. Let’s take a look at why you might want to connect and begin exporting your GA4 data to BigQuery today.

Exporting GA4 data to BigQuery

  1. You can store and retain all of your data without it expiring, unlike Google Analytics 4, which will delete data outside of the Data Retention window. The export to BigQuery only begins from the point you set up the connection – set it up today so that you can use the data whenever you’re ready.
  1. It really doesn’t cost much. The Google Cloud Platform provides a free allowance each month for each project, and normally you shouldn’t expect storage to cost much more than $2 per day (that’s assuming you have 100k users per day, each logging 100 events over 2 years, using the GCP Pricing Calculator).
  1. You can take the opportunity to clean your data, which means that pesky “faceboook” UTM can be amended to the correct name, and you can also generate custom campaign and channel groupings that align to your marketing strategies.

Get more insight into your most important user journeys

  1. You can create (and retrospectively apply) as many conversions as you like. You can even test out new conversions before adding them directly into GA4.
  1. You can join your GA4 data with other data to get a more holistic view of your KPIs and user journeys. Just imagine being able to add your advertising revenue, CRM data, and other sources to your online data and what you could do with that!
  1. Perform advanced analysis the way you need to, including user journey analysis, attribution modelling, Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), retention and churn predictions, and so much more (the list is almost infinite).

The benefits of analysing Google Analytics data in BigQuery

  1. Create super fast reports and dashboards within your preferred data visualisation and BI tools. No more tedious waiting around for reports to load.
  1. You can easily use tools such as Python, R, SAS, and BigQuery ML (machine learning) to build powerful advanced analytics models – to help develop towards a more data-driven organisation.
  1. Data can be fed back into GA4, Google Ads, or even to other on-prem and cloud services such as AWS and Azure.
  1. Save time on all the manual, repetitive reporting jobs. Automate and schedule your reporting so that your team can get on with focusing on actually using the data to optimise and drive change.

Move your GA4 data to BigQuery today

There are so many reasons to connect and export data from Google Analytics 4 to BigQuery. What are you waiting for?

Get in touch to speak with one of our Analytics Consultants about how this can work for your team and how to get started today.

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