Google Analytics 4 includes native integration with Google BigQuery that allows you to export all raw, event-level data from your GA4 property to a BigQuery dataset. This is one of GA4’s most powerful features — and one that is available free for GA4 properties (with storage and query costs in BigQuery). Here is what you get and how to use it.
What GA4 BigQuery Export Does
Every event tracked by GA4 — page views, add-to-cart, purchases, session starts, scroll events — is exported to BigQuery as a row of raw data. The export includes:
- Event name and timestamp
- All event parameters
- User pseudo ID (anonymised user identifier)
- Session ID
- Traffic source and medium
- Device category, operating system, browser
- Geo data (country, region, city)
- Ecommerce data (items, value, transaction ID)
Unlike GA4 reports (which sample data for large properties), BigQuery export is 100% unsampled. You get every event, not an estimate.
How to Enable GA4 BigQuery Export
Step 1: Set up a Google Cloud Project
Go to console.cloud.google.com and create a new project (or use an existing one). Enable billing on the project (BigQuery storage has a free tier, but you need billing enabled to avoid export failures). Enable the BigQuery API in the project.
Step 2: Link GA4 to BigQuery
In GA4, go to Admin → Product Links → BigQuery Links → Link. Select the Google Cloud project you created. Choose the BigQuery dataset location (select the region closest to your primary audience for better performance). Configure the export type:
- Daily: exports previous day’s events once per day. Free within BigQuery’s free tier for most small-medium properties.
- Streaming: exports events in near real-time (within seconds). Incurs BigQuery Streaming Insertion costs (~$0.01 per 200MB). Useful if you need real-time data analysis.
Enable both event data and user data exports. Click Save.
Step 3: Access Your Data in BigQuery
After 24–48 hours (for the first daily export), your data will appear in BigQuery as a dataset named after your GA4 property. Tables are named events_YYYYMMDD (one table per day). You can query them with standard SQL.
What BigQuery Costs for Shopify Stores
For most Shopify stores with moderate traffic:
- Storage: first 10GB free per month. Most small-medium stores stay within free tier for months. A year of data for a 100k-session/month store is roughly 2–5GB.
- Queries: first 1TB of queries per month is free. SQL queries on your GA4 data rarely exceed this for typical analysis workloads.
Total cost for most Shopify stores: $0–10/month for daily export.
What You Can Do with GA4 BigQuery Data
Unsampled revenue analysis
GA4 standard reports may sample data for large properties. BigQuery gives you exact numbers for revenue, conversions, and session counts — no estimates.
Custom attribution modelling
Build your own attribution model by querying user paths. You can see every session touchpoint in sequence, apply your own credit distribution logic, and calculate channel attribution that is specific to your business rules.
Customer cohort analysis
Query which customers (by pseudo-user-ID) purchased in month 1, then came back in month 2. Calculate retention rates and LTV curves from raw event data — more flexible than GA4’s built-in retention reports.
Session path analysis
Find the most common navigation paths that lead to purchase. Which page sequences have the highest conversion rate? What pages are most commonly the last stop before exit on the product page?
Connect to Looker Studio for custom dashboards
BigQuery tables can be directly connected to Looker Studio (Google Data Studio). You can build dashboards that pull from BigQuery SQL queries — combining GA4 event data with Shopify order data (exported to BigQuery) for unified analysis.
GA4 BigQuery Export for Shopify: Connecting Your Order Data
For the most complete analysis, export your Shopify order data to BigQuery as well (via Shopify’s built-in BigQuery export or a tool like Fivetran). With both GA4 events and Shopify orders in BigQuery, you can join them on order ID and build a unified customer analytics dataset that neither GA4 nor Shopify can provide alone.
Get Started with GA4 BigQuery Export
GA4 BigQuery export is free to enable and provides access to data capabilities that are simply not available in standard GA4 reports. If you have a Google Cloud account, there is no reason not to enable it.
Book your free Shopify tracking audit here and we will check your GA4 setup and confirm BigQuery export is configured correctly for your property.