Many of us consider writing documentation a bit of a dull task. Organizations make it even worse by hoarding the documentation in centralized but isolated systems such as Confluence. This approach can easily lead to a situation where writing documentation becomes a project of its own. Ideally, the documentation would evolve continuously whenever the queries […]
Dataform Tips – Managing Column Descriptions Read More »
When you start working with GA4 data in BigQuery, you’ll hear that you should avoid connecting your dashboards directly to the raw data export tables. The reasons behind this include query performance and cost optimization. The need for optimizing your data sources is especially true when working with item-level ecommerce data. In this post, I’ll
GA4 BigQuery – Ecommerce Table with Item List Attribution Read More »
The recent fix by Google makes the session_start and first_visit more consistent by including the event parameters, such as the traffic source details, that used to be missing. However, there are still many issues related to these two events. At best, they are just a bit off, while in worst cases, they are complete junk.
Why you should avoid using the session_start and first_visit events in GA4 Read More »
Incremental tables allow maintaining tables based on large source data by only performing small periodic queries. In this post, I’ll share three different methods for performing an incremental refresh. The code examples are all based on the GA4 BigQuery export data.
Incremental Refresh Techniques for Dataform – GA4 Read More »
I had my first touch with OneTrust in 2018. Since then, I’ve worked with the tool many times as it remains one of the market’s most popular consent management platforms (CMP). This post goes through how you can integrate OneTrust with the consent configuration feature in Tag Manager.
Integrate OneTrust with Google Tag Manager Read More »
The daily BigQuery export schedules for GA4 are notoriously random. Sometimes the data is processed in the early-morning hours, sometimes at noon, and sometimes not even during the next day. In this article, I’ll walk you through how to set up a Cloud Workflow that compiles and executes the selected queries in your Dataform project.
Run Dataform queries immediately after the GA4 BigQuery export happens Read More »
This blog post will show how to recreate the GA4 session traffic source dimensions using BigQuery export event data. The result will be a lookup table containing the last non-direct source of traffic for each unique session id.
Query the GA4 Session Last Non-direct Traffic Source in BigQuery Read More »
In this blog post, I’ll share a simple server-side GTM client template that you can use to pull visitor user properties back to the website to the client device. You can then push the data to the dataLayer to make it easily accessible for client-side tracking or personalization use cases.
Pull visitor data through server-side Tag Manager to the dataLayer Read More »
This post will show you how to create your own IP lookup API for Google Tag Manager using a Google Cloud Function. The location data can then be pushed to the dataLayer using a custom HTML tag.
GTM geolocation API Cloud Function Read More »
In this post, I will go through how to set up a simple event stream from server-side Tag Manager directly to BigQuery. The idea is to keep the setup as simple as possible. That way, it’s suitable for different kinds of experimentation and debugging needs. Post updates Things to consider when sending data to BigQuery
Send events from Server-side Tag Manager to BigQuery Read More »