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 »
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 »
Server-side Tag Manager is essentially a proxy between the user’s device and the vendor or endpoint used to collect data. With server-side GTM in place, you have full control over anything sent forward from the server. For example, personal data such as IP addresses are not forwarded to the vendors unless you specifically choose to
IP Exclusion Filtering in Server-side Tag Manager Read More »
One of the significant improvements in GA4 over the old Universal Analytics is its event-based data model and the free data export to BigQuery. This article is a collection of some of the most common SQL formulas, plus a few extras, needed when working with the GA4 event data in BigQuery.
BigQuery SQL Cheat Sheet for GA4 Read More »