What is the Pipeline - GA4?
We take your raw GA4 BigQuery data and transform it into simple to use tables, giving you the power of the raw data without the complexity.
These tables can then be accessed through our Looker Studio connector or directly pulled from BigQuery into any other BI platform.
If you're not familiar with this at all, the quick pitch is:
- Google let's you export raw GA4 data - Google allows you to export all of your raw event data from your GA4 properties into BigQuery (Google’s cloud data warehouse solution).
- It's super valuable - Having access to this raw GA4 data is super valuable. It fixes most of the common weaknesses of GA4 and allows you to do a lot of really valuable pieces of analysis.
- But it's complex to use - This data is stored in a fairly complex manner. You usually need a data engineer or a BI team to make it useful.
- Pipeline does it all for you - Pipeline takes that raw data and transforms it into simple to use tables, doing all the complex transformations for you and letting you configure it all through a simple UI.
- Easy access to the data - You can then access the tables directly in BigQuery or with our own Looker Studio connector.
Why use BigQuery and why use Pipeline?
These are the two most common questions we get:
- Why use GA4 BigQuery over the GA4 interface?
- And then why use Pipeline rather than building something yourself?
Why use BigQuery?
No more sampling and API Limits
No more sampling, cardinality or data limits you find in the GA4 interface.
You can keep your data forever
The 14 month restriction on raw data is one the biggest businesses face. With BigQuery you can have your raw GA4 data stored forever, for all time.
Raw data is incredibly powerful
Want to create an interesting new dimension? Maybe, last page viewed before conversion or number of blog posts read over the past year? With raw data, there are essentially no limits you can build pretty much whatever you want. No more struggling through the interface or the Looker Studio connector to get something done.
Why use Pipeline?
No data engineer required
You don’t need to know any SQL, or have a data engineer to make the most of it.
Want a complex segment? Or a new user property? Fill in a form and you’ve got it.
A better Looker Studio connector
The default Looker Studio connector is ok. But it has all the restrictions of the GA4 UI plus some of it’s own.
Because our Looker Studio connector builds off your raw BigQuery GA4, we can help you get around all of the limits of the default connector.
You’ll be able to:
- Filter out spam
- Pull out custom dimensions and metrics
- Plot the number of users who converted after visiting a blog.
- Find the last content page viewed before conversion?
- etc.
- Get access to separate columns for period comparison data.
- Accurately count users for segments
- …and all of the other standard benefits from using our tables.
Friendly UI
Configuring GA4 BigQuery Export can be a bit fiddly. There are a lot of options and a lot of decisions.
We know that and we’ve built our interface with it in mind, we’ll walk you through all the hard decisions to make configuring easy.
Reduce BigQuery costs
Using GA4 with BigQuery, is practically free for smaller sites, but if you have a large site it’s quite easy to start racking up the costs. Particularly when working with more complex segments like user dimensions.
Our team has a huge amount of experience at running larger models and we found people who went from some copy pasted home builds to using Pipeline having their data costs reduced by 100x.
E.g. we saw someone go from raw tables which were ~1GB a day, to our sessions table which was 40mb a day. (That’s 0.004%).
Let someone else handle your data problems
We’ve got a huge amount of experience dealing with GA4 BigQuery. If you do run into issues you’ll have access to our experienced team ready to jump in and support.
Let’s get started
We can think of this in two parts:
Use the navigation to navigate through these steps.