Google’s BigQuery is a perfect fit as Marketing Analytics Data Warehouse (DWH). Even if you are not the tech affine marketing guy and you don’t have the power in your team to deal with a DWH, please do your future techie and your business a favor and enable the Export to BigQuery, today. The data will be exported from the set up date on and you start collecting data. Later is too late.
Google Analytics 360 exported Analytics raw data into BigQuery. With the new Google Analytics 4 property, this premium feature is now available for everyone. External data can be imported to enhance this data and this sets no limits in building own machine learning models. Models include forecasting, regression, classification, clustering, recommendation systems and more.
Having raw data frees you from the limits of the UI:
- This export will save raw data on hit level. Hit level data allows to answer more questions than it is possible in GA UI.
- With free querying over hit data, you habe more analyses possibilities than the UI offers.
- The raw data is not sampled like on the UI. Sampling is not a bad thing per se. But, this was sometimes a problem if you had high cardinality for some dimensions.
- Data can be enriched and joined with any external data.
- Full Google Cloud Infrastructure Stack can be applied to process the analytics web data.
- Famous data reporting vendors offer connection to BigQuery, Tableau, PowerBI, etc.
Having raw data in BigQuery enables custom Artificial Intelligence methods in Marketing for wider amount of practitioners:
- BigQuery data can be queried by SQL, which is familiar to most analysts.
- BigQuery ML enables easy AI with SQL syntax.
- With AI you can, score your visitors, forecast your conversions, discover personalization options for your service, etc.
Short: A web analyst or a data scientist can have huge fun in BigQuery.
How to set up automatic export to BigQuery
The BigQuery export set-up is done very quickly. Since this used to be a part of Google Analytics 360, which costs about $ 150.000 right now, I am wondering if Google will charge this in the future. Right now, it is free. Don’t worry about the BigQuery costs. Costs are low and minimum gain for your business will be worth it. Check the Google BigQuery Price List.
