In this post I’ve tried to collect different training resources that I’ve found useful for myself, some for free and some for a fee. The focus is using BigQuery for digital analytics. If you are one of the lucky digital analysts who work for an organisation with the 360 version of Google Analytics or Firebase Blaze, but not started using BigQuery? Then, don’t wait for it, enable the BigQuery Export (read this post if you are acting in EU) and learn how to use BigQuery....
At Google I/O May 2017, Firebase announced Google Analytics for Firebase, a fantastic tool that automatically captures data on how people are using your iOS and Android app and lets you define your own custom app events. Like Google Analytics 360, it offers the ability to export raw data to Google BigQuery for custom analysis. There are a few posts on Google Cloud Platform Blog and Firebase Blog on how to query the Firebase dataset, but none of them giving much advise on how to analyze multiple properties and parameters at the same time....
Second to being able to export your Google Analytics data to Google BigQuery, the feature I value the most with the premium version of GA is that you are not limited to 20 custom dimensions but have 200 to play with! However, if you have many custom dimensions, it quickly becomes hard to remember what dimension each index represents, the value isn’t always selfdescribing. Hence being able to give the custom dimension a more descriptive identifier than an index could be useful....
Updated 2018-04-23 with a fourth alternative - Unnest
Are you one of the lucky digital analysts that have a google analytics premium account? (If not, checkout the open source solution DataHem to get premium features such as your GA data in BigQuery) Then you know you can export your data to Google BigQuery and analyze it in an adhoc and explorative manner using SQL. One frequent use case for BigQuery is to analyze many custom dimensions at the same time....
(Updated 2018-01-23): Google has now included my input in the GA360 BigQuery Export documentation for how to geolocate your data in EU.
April 2017 when I tried to set up BigQuery export on one of our Google Analytics premium views I found out that I couldn’t chose region for the export and that it defaults to US. Since my employer is an European comapny I prefer to store the data in EU....