Why Use BigQuery Linked with GA4 for Enhanced Reporting: A Guide for Flexible, Real-Time Data Analysis

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is widely used for tracking website and app interactions, but its built-in reporting has some limitations, particularly for real-time data and custom reporting needs. Integrating GA4 with BigQuery allows businesses to store raw GA4 data in BigQuery tables, making it possible to write SQL queries and create views that deliver detailed, customized reports that GA4 alone can’t support. This guide explains how BigQuery can enhance GA4’s reporting capabilities and why its Streaming feature is valuable for real-time, detailed analysis and debugging.

User Tracking with GA4: Custom Looker Studio Report vs. GA4 User Explorer

Despite the fact that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is not primarily designed to focus on individual user behavior, it does offer a User Explorer report to analyze the activity of individual users. This report allows businesses to see detailed data on how users interact with their website, including event tracking and session data. However, while the User Explorer report provides valuable insights, it has some limitations that can affect its overall effectiveness.

Marketing Costs Analysis Dashboard in Looker Studio

Many Google Analytics 4 (GA4) users struggle to derive meaningful insights from the reports suggested in GA4. One common frustration is that GA4, by default, only provides advertising cost data from Google Ads, leaving out crucial spend information from other key platforms like Meta (Facebook), TikTok, and Bing. This can make it difficult to get a complete view of your marketing performance.

Managing Thresholding Challenges in GA4 Effectively

Samplation has often been a pain for Universal Analytics users. With the move to Google Analytics 4, the quotas for queries have been greatly increased. In GA4, the quota limit for event-level queries is 10 million events for standard Google Analytics properties and up to 1 billion events for Google Analytics 360 properties. This enables GA4 users to report on large timeframes and multiple dimensions without any sampling.