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From UA to GA4: The indispensable BigQuery connection

Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 9:45 am
by tanmoy667
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 email hong kong 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 with thousands or hundreds of thousands of visitors per day, there are also many options to monitor or limit the costs.