Get Started with Google Analytics in BigQuery

About This Course

Are you ready to find out why so many companies are linking Google Analytics to BigQuery? This short introductory course will explain the benefits of BigQuery, explore how the integration works with Google Analytics, and show you the ways that companies are using BigQuery to get more value from Google Analytics. At the end of this course you will have three things:

1. Familiarity with BigQuery, how the integration with Google Analytics works, and even some sample queries to give you a jumpstart.

2. Inspiration for the ways that you and your company might benefit from the BigQuery integration.

3. Helpful resources for those who are ready to go deeper and start using BigQuery for reporting on Google Analytics data.

Who is it for?

This is an introductory course. Participants should be familiar with Google Analytics, but new to BigQuery and the Google Cloud Platform. This is not a technical course and you do not need to be familiar with SQL, although we will share some queries for those who would like to get their hands dirty.

For a more advanced course see How to Model Google Analytics Data with Dataform.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites required for this course.

Schedule

This course includes 3 hours of instruction time split into two 1.5 hour sessions.

Session 1) Overview of the BigQuery integration and how it works.

• The Problem: The limitations of the Google Analytics user interface and API.

• Why BigQuery is such a great solution for overcoming these limitations.

  • Pricing model

  • Columnar database

  • Serverless and fully managed by Google

• How do you estimate the cost of storing Google Analytics data in BigQuery?

• The downsides of pulling Google Analytics reports from BigQuery, and how to determine if it is a good fit for you.

• Sample dataset review:

  • Overview of the four tables generated by the export

  • Understanding the nested data structure

  • Example: Use the UNNEST operator to pull the top pages by event count.

• Homework: Use the UNNEST operator to modify the example query to pull top page titles by page_views.

Session 2) What possibilities are unlocked with the BigQuery integration.

• Improved and unlimited Google Analytics reporting

  • Data retention

  • Unlimited query size

    • Controlling costs by setting limits

    • Optimizing with partitioning and clustering

  • Historic data corrections (such as bounce rate)

  • Fixing bugs in the UI

  • Orchestration with Dataform

• Blending data sources:

  • Methods for importing other data sources into BigQuery

  • The three methods for blending data with Google Analytics:

    • Joining activity by date (ex: Facebook spend + web conversions)

    • Joining activity by UTM’s (ex: emails sent + web conversions)

    • Joining activity by user identifiers (ex: CRM conversions + GA traffic sources)

  • Key use cases: performance overviews, and customer data platforms

• Advanced analysis with BQML:

  • What is BQML, and when to use it.

  • Forecasting and anomaly detection (walk through code example)

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How to Sign Up

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