Before GA4, a connection from Google Analytics to BigQuery was only available for those that paid for the Analytics 360 version. However, with GA4, a free connector was made available to all users, allowing Google to open BigQuery to all businesses. Undoubtedly, this is a business-savvy move for Google, since it allows them to attain revenue from the cost of querying and storing data on the platform. However, despite the cost, this gives businesses the ability to access a phenomenal tool that can help them scale up their data analysis on their GA4 data should they have the specialized expertise available. Here are a few reasons why you should use BigQuery with your GA4 data.
You may have noticed that Google sent out an email last week which caused a lot of confusion, because it said to upgrade to the latest tag within Google Analytics. This is going from analytics.js to gtag.js. Part of the reason it caused so much confusion is because obviously you want to make sure that you’re running the latest version of Google Analytics and people were concerned.
The Google Analytics Global Tag (GTAG.js) is a newer means of coding a website for Google Analytics data collection. As an added bonus, the tag seamlessly allows for both tracking AdWords and Google Analytics in one simple tag.