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The day that Universal Analytics will be discontinued (July 1, 2023) will be marked in the agenda of many online marketers. If all goes well, you have already switched to GA4, because this replacement has been on the market since 2020. Opinions are still divided about the quality of Google’s new Analytics tool, but in this article I want to highlight one feature that is certainly a big improvement over Universal Analytics.
It’s about the ability to connect BigQuery to your GA4 property. This was already possible with Universal, but only if you had the paid version at your disposal (Google Analytics 360). You don’t need a paid license to connect GA4 to BigQuery. So this is one of the big plus points of GA4.
What is BigQuery?
BigQuery is Google’s data warehouse that runs on the Google Cloud Platform. You can manage datasets from multiple sources in a highly scalable way. This means that you can create small tables or very large tables with millions of rows. You pay based on the use of your datasets. This makes it an excellent service for both large and small companies. The datasets can be accessed via SQL (Structured Query Language). This is a universal language for reading or manipulating data from tables.
Costs
As mentioned, the initial connection between GA4 and BigQuery is free. However, there are costs associated with using the BigQuery datasets. Of course, you have complete control over this, but the costs are relatively low.
The costs are calculated based on the number of queries you run and the size of the dataset in which the query is run. In general, you do not have to worry if you use a smaller dataset. If you have a website list of portugal consumer email with thousands or hundreds of thousands of visitors per day, there are also many options to monitor or limit the costs.
Why would you want BigQuery data?
There are many advantages if your GA4 data is also available in BigQuery. The most important thing for me is that you are now completely in control with raw data. GA4 has many possibilities check out our complete data privacy guide for brands and ensure your users’ trust to create advanced reports and often the standard reports will also provide insight. However, for the more advanced analysis pieces it is still nicer to be able to use the raw data. Because you have almost unlimited possibilities via SQL queries, it gives a feeling of freedom. More about this later in this article.
The other big advantage of BigQuery data is that you own ao lists your datasets from GA4. So you don’t have to worry about your website data ever being deleted from GA4 by Google, because you own your data in BigQuery.
You can easily connect BigQuery to Google’s Looker Studio. So it’s easy to create dashboards in Looker from your datasets. The connection between these systems has been very popular for a few months, because the native connection between GA4 and Looker is limited by quotas from Google. BigQuery does not have these quotas, so this is another good argument for using BigQuery.
In addition, I noticed that the native connection between GA4 and Looker does not yet contain all metrics and dimensions – which is a major limitation in my eyes. With BigQuery you are unlimited in selecting metrics and dimensions that you need for your dashboards. By the way, you can also connect other BI and dashboarding tools with BigQuery, this is not limited to Looker Studio.
The disadvantages
There are no real disadvantages to using BigQuery.