Google Analytics Goes Big with GA Premium + BigQuery

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Today is a big day.  I bought a house and one of the most exciting things yet for Google Analytics was announced! This afternoon (May 16th) at Google I/O, Google Analytics announced plans for a direct integration between Google Analytics Premium and Google BigQuery.  This powerful integration will enable users of the Premium edition of GA to gain a deep view into huge sets of unsampled digital analytics data. I am extremely excited about this because it finally unlocks the immense volumes of marketing and behavioral data within Google Analytics for deep exploration and analysis.  I've written before about some of the awesome things one can do with more advanced data analysis as well as the importance of unsampled data for high traffic sites - however the pain of getting large sets of unsampled data has been rather significant.  It's worth the effort in order to make decisions on clear, clean data, but this announcement is like an ice cold drink on a hot day. Some of the top things I am excited for with this integration include:
  • Raw data, en mass at hit and session levels
  • Deep querying abilities - with a robust data model and BigQuery, answering complex questions will be much easier
  • Shorten the distance to get at this data: right now exporting granular level data is quite a journey of defining a query in GA, exporting unsampled data, downloading it, and importing it into a tool - with this, that integration evaporates into running a query
I'm particularly excited when I think about solutions such as Tableau Software, which is already connected to BigQuery, making immense scale, speed and granularity a quick reality. We'll keep you posted as more develops on this front. In the meantime, if you're not already a Google Analytics Premium user, learn more about the platform here or contact us. Best, -Caleb