BigQuery

If you’re using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track your website’s performance, you’ve likely run into some frustrating limitations. Whether you’re trying to generate annual reports, analyze customer trends over long periods, or dive deep into user behavior, GA4’s built-in reporting has severe restrictions that can lead to incomplete, inaccurate, or even missing data.

Some of the most common GA4 challenges include:

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) represents a major shift in the way businesses track and analyze their online performance. Unlike Universal Analytics, GA4 focuses on events and users instead of sessions, offering marketers and small business owners powerful tools to understand their audiences on a deeper level.

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.

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.

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.

Streaming raw Google Analytics data means duplicating all the hits (events, page views, transactions, etc.) you send to Google Analytics in a different database (in BigQuery).

It means you will get all the raw unfiltered hits and you can either process this data further or use it for any kind of analysis.

Two most popular opportunities to get Google Analytics data in BigQuery for non-premium Google Analytics users.