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Using BigQuery for real-time Google Analytics in Looker Studio

This post is here to document what I’ve learnt about using Google BigQuery to process data from Google Analytics so it can be delivered near real-time into Looker Studio.

The problem

I needed to see advertising traffic going to a University website in real-time. This was for A level results day, a key day in the Higher Education calendar.

With Universal Analytics (GA3) it was possible to pull new data into Looker Studio every 15minutes.

However, Google has limited GA4 to update every 24-36 hours. Usually this doesn’t cause too much trouble. But as the peak focus of results day lasts a few hours, it’s important to have data that’s near real-time.

I’d read that Google BigQuery had the ability to receive GA4 data as it happens. However, I’ve never used it and my SQL is very limited.

This article documents what I learnt over a couple of weeks to build a series of databoards that could be used by my fellow marketers.

Data flow through the systems

I’ve created a few diagrams to record my understanding of how the data flows from the website through each platform to get to the marketer.

You can see them below in a dump. I’ll come back later and flesh this out.

Efficiently connect Looker Studio to BigQuery using scheduled queries

I have to say a big thank you to Stockton from Vision Labs (video below) because without his video’s help it would have taken me far longer to do all the SQL in BigQuery for Google Analytics.

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