GA4 & Reverse ETL: Activating Your Behavioral Data in BigQuery
Learn how you can start leveraging your data in BigQuery to enrich your customer data in Google Analytics.
Glenn Vanderlinden
April 20, 2022
7 minutes
Data Enrichment: Your behavioral data can now be shared with and leveraged by various data & marketing destinations like Salesforce, Hubspot, or Slack. For example, you’ll be able to personalize your marketing campaigns in your ESP (i.e. Braze) with the specific products a user saw while browsing your website.
Better Audiences: Audiences created in Hightouch can now be built leveraging more granular behavioral signals. An example of this could be an audience for cart abandoners syncing to Facebook, Google, and your ESP for multichannel retargeting campaigns. By creating audiences centrally in Hightouch, you no longer have to worry about creating and maintaining each audience across multiple destinations. In short - richer audiences are managed centrally and activated across your stack.
Resource Savings: Adopting a Reverse ETL solution like Hightouch means you’re outsourcing integrations and API management. This allows your engineering team to focus on what matters for your business rather than maintaining integrations with 3rd party solutions.
How Does this Compare to a CDP?
While GA4 does now handle the collection of behavioral events, as well as the syncing of those events to the data warehouse (BigQuery) for analysis where it can then be activated through a Data Activation Platform like Hightouch, there is still a missing component of ID resolution in the warehouse.
The purpose of identity resolution is to stitch together all the various customer events and provide your teams with a singular view of a customer. In addition to the need to stitch events to users, Google does not allow for PII (only user_id variants), meaning that behavioral data will need to be stitched to PII data once it's in the data warehouse. This identity resolution will need to be built by the data engineering team in charge of the data warehouse, which actually is a manageable task.
Reverse ETL solutions make the most sense in companies where there has been investment in bringing data to the warehouse and making it the source of truth through enrichment efforts like ID resolution. If this is the case, then Google Analytics 4 now allows you to add a new behavioral data stream to further enrich your destinations, your user profiles, and the calculated traits that come with it.
Send Enriched Data Back to Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 makes it easy to extract and enrich your customer data within your BigQuery data warehouse. A common enrichment use case is to marry online behavior like product views with offline events like in-store purchases.
Marketers and business analysts want to see these offline events in the context of their existing reporting dashboard, Google Analytics. Google developed the Measurement Protocol API so developers can send data to GA4 to enable analysts to:
- Tie Online to Offline Behavior
- Measure interactions both client-side and server-side
- Send events that happen outside standard user interaction (e.g., offline conversions)
Unfortunately, the Measurement Protocol becomes one more API integration for engineers to develop and maintain.
Enter Hightouch’s Google Analytics 4 Integration
In addition to the more than 200 marketing, sales, and business applications, Hightouch now supports Google Analytics 4 as a destination to activate your data.
Connect your data source — BigQuery or any of the data sources Hightouch supports — with Google Analytics 4 in minutes. Start syncing your data as often as you need. Your analysts will thank you.
For more information, check out our Google Analytics 4 Documentation.
About the Author
Glenn Vanderlinden is co-founder and solution architect at Human37. Their mission is to build a world where customers get the best experiences from brands. Human37 does this by helping brands build their customer data strategy and their technology stack to activate their data.
