How to Connect GA4 to BigQuery

Hi, this is Natalie from Marcel Digital. Today we're going to walk through how to connect your GA4 to BigQuery. This is becoming an increasingly important step for businesses and marketers who have large amounts of data, are hitting quota limits in looker studio, or want to hold onto their universal analytics data for longer than a year. Let's get started. 

Connecting GA4 to BigQuery is free and simple. First, you want to create a Google API's console project. To do so, create a Google API's console project, or select an existing one. Navigate to the APIs table by opening the navigation menu in the top left corner. From there, click APIs and services and then click library. Next, you'll activate BigQuery under Google Cloud APIs, click BigQuery API and then enable. You may be prompted to review and agree to the terms of service. 

Now that BigQuery has been enabled, you need to prep your project for BigQuery export. You can export your GA4 data into the BigQuery Sandbox free of charge. There are a few limitations, but Google offers some upgrade solutions for you. After you've completed the first two steps, you can enable BigQuery export from analytics. First, make sure you're in the correct analytics account, and then click admin. In the property column under product links, click BigQuery links, click link and choose a big query project to display a list of projects that you have at least read permission for. Select a project from the list, then click confirm. Select a location for the data. If your project already has a data set for the analytics property, you can't configure this option. Then you wanna click Next and then configure data streams and events to select which data streams to include with the export. You can choose any specific events you want to exclude from the export, and you can do this by either clicking add to select from a list of existing events or by clicking specify event name to choose existing events by name, or to specify event names that have yet to be collected on the property. 

Once you've finished adding and excluding events from the export, click done, then select include advertising identifiers for mobile app streams if this applies to you. Next, you want to select either a daily or streaming Export of data. Daily means that GA4 data will export into BigQuery once a day, while streaming is a continuous export of data. For most cases, you will just need to export data daily. Click next, and once you've reviewed your settings and you're happy with them, click submit. Well, there you have it. We have integrated GA4 with BigQuery. If you're wondering whether or not this BigQuery integration is right for your business, our data and insights team here at Marcel Digital can help with that process. We offer migration services that will allow for a seamless integration of your GA4 data and BigQuery. Let us know if you have any other questions about BigQuery, Google Analytics 4, Looker Studio, or any of the above. We are here to help you. Bye.