If you use Google Analytics 4, sooner or later you will hit a wall: the interface limits. Whether it’s the famous “Quota Error” in your Looker Studio dashboards and reports or the need to cross-reference data with your CRM, the answer is always the same: BigQuery.
What is BigQuery? #
In simple terms, BigQuery is Google’s Data Warehouse. Imagine a giant, infinitely powerful Excel where you can store every single event that happens on your website without the GA4 interface summarizing it or applying “thresholding” (hiding data for privacy reasons).
Why should you connect it today? #
There is a critical technical reason: the GA4 export to BigQuery is not retroactive.
If you connect it today, your data starts being stored today.
If you connect it in 6 months, you will have lost half a year of raw data that GA4 has already deleted or summarized.
Plus, it’s the only way to have full ownership of your information.
How to set up the connection #
In this video, I show you how to set up the project from scratch in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and link it in your GA4 admin panel.
Key configuration points: #
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GCP Project: Create a new one specifically for your analytics. You can use the Free Tier (Sandbox) without needing a credit card.
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Data Location: Choose the region that best suits you (usually US or Europe).
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Export Frequency:
- Daily: A package of data every day. It’s free and enough for most users.
- Streaming: Real-time data. Only available if you enable billing in Google Cloud.
What’s next? #
Once you see the “Link created” message, you just have to wait 24 hours for your first dataset to appear in the BigQuery console. In the following entries of this manual, we will see how to understand that event table that seems like chaos at first.
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Thanks for reading, and see you in the next chapter!