How do access my GA4 data?
Once you have set up your GA4 pipeline, there are several ways of accessing the data.
- Looker Studio Connector
- BigQuery Tables
- The default GA4 Looker Studio Report
Which one should I pick to access my data?
The data behind both the Looker Studio Connector & BigQuery is the same (see the diagram below).
- If you’re a beginner, Looker Studio is easier to use.
- If you like your SQL or you’re looking to do more complex stuff, BigQuery is probably better.
You should pick the Pipeline Looker Studio connector when:
- You want friendly names: The field names in Looker Studio are more user-friendly. Instead of seeing a field name like
dim__device_category, you can see it asDevice Category. - You want to do less customisation/work: Looker Studio has pre-calculated fields not found in our raw tables. Many metrics (i.e. Session Count) can only be calculated at the final stage (e.g. a Looker Studio/BI tool) if they’re going to be accurate. We do provide the formulas if you’re looking to add them to a BI tool yourself, but it will involve more manual work.
You should pick the BigQuery tables when:
- You want to do more customisation: The key thing is that you’ve got a raw table to work with, there’s no intermediate steps happening you can’t see and you can do whatever you’d like with it.
- Build in a BI tool outside of Looker Studio: If you want to build in a BI tool outside of Looker Studio e.g. Looker, Tableau, etc. you’ll have to use this option.
To give some examples of 1. The most common things we see people doing with this are:
- Changing the date logic (e.g. Adding pre-filtered time periods like quarters)
- Combining the GA4 tables with other data sources (e.g. a CRM, Google Ads, Search Console etc).
You can still generate the same metrics that are in the Looker Studio connector.
We provide the formulas in the tables which can be found in the navigation.
FAQS - Accessing Your Data
In short, no.
The Pipeline Looker Studio connector is built off your GA4 BigQuery data that has been processed.
You’re getting access to all of our processed data and the features that come with it.
The default connector uses the API. It will have a similar set of restrictions to the actual GA4 UI, sampling, storage limits, flexibility etc.
Metrics such as "Sessions Count" in the Sessions Table and "User Count" in the Users Table can only be calculated at the final stage because they rely on filtering and re-aggregating data.
These calculations are only accurate after the filtering and re-aggregation is complete.
Example:
Let’s say that we want to count the number of unique users who visited the site over a 3 day period.
This is how our users visited the site.
Depending on how we count users we can get different numbers.
- Unique users over the whole period: 4
- Unique users by day:
- Day 1: 2
- Day 2: 1
- Day 3: 2
If we add up the second, we get 5. We double counted a user.
When we pre-group/filter data we can end up with incorrect data because of this type of scenario. In order to avoid this we have to calculate these metrics in the BI tool.