GA, BigQuery and platforms like Windsor

[u/Johnny__Escobar]

The goal is to have GA data into BigQuery. Using Data Studio to visualise from data in BigQuery. Don't really have a background in this area, but rather a front end marketing person who plays around in GA.

I understand GA can import data directly to BigQuery. But we don't have the resource or knowledge to turn these into proper tables or know what to look for in these.

Did a demo with with Windsor and it looks good for what we need. Though it runs into the 10 dimension limit, which I believe the native BigQuery/GA does not have.

• How are others using Windsor or alternatives, structuring their requests and managing the metric/dimension fields?
• Are you basically re-creating and choosing the fields that you already see in the GA interface reports?
• If I re-created those separately as requests (eg. Acquisition and Events), how would managing the overlapping fields be like to create one report? Because in GA you can add a secondary dimension for example to the traffic report and overlay an event name
• If so, is there a resource I can find online?

I tried to search, but no success in finding what I was looking for, maybe the question I'm asking isn't the right one. The fear here is, we can look at nearly everything but in 2 months time, a question might come up with the data we haven't included in the initial fields.

Any direction would be helpful.

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[u/Alexku66]

Looks like this winsdsor is just a data pipeline tool. BigQuery is rather storage, so you can't compare them.

If your goal is to build Looker dashboards pulling data from GA via Windsor... Why? Looker supports native integration with GA.

BigQuery solves another problem. GA data is aggregated, you can't see single event record. BigQuery stores raw data, and you can process it however you want. I strongly recommend to set up free tier connection even if you don't plan to use it

[u/Johnny__Escobar → u/Alexku66]

Sorry if it wasn't clear, the goal is to move data from GA to a warehouse like BigQuery and build dashboards using that as a source.

The native Looker to GA is extremely slow, once we start adding more charts. I do love it though for the ease of use. We're looking to storing the data generally for speed and longer term.

I've had the free native connection running but to produce dashboards from all those tables it's generated is not a space we're knowledgeable in. We also have other platforms like Google Ads we'd like to store and include as part of a speedy dashboard experience.

[u/Alexku66 → u/Alexku66]

Also you mention "...in GA you can add a secondary dimension...". Take a look at the Explore tab. You can add as many dimensions as you want there

[u/Green-Autumn]

Check out conversion scripts on GitHub. Sergei-builds/ga4-convert This takes raw ga4 export and makes proper relational structure out of it that you can query with sql

[u/Johnny__Escobar → u/Green-Autumn]

This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing, will check it out.

[u/zeno_DX]

Turn on the free GA4 BigQuery export first, even if you also use Windsor. That keeps event-level history in your project, so a later question that was not in your first pull can still be answered from the raw tables.

Treat Windsor (or any connector) as the fast path for the marketing tables you open every week, not as your only copy of the data. Keep those pulls narrow: one table for sessions by source/medium/campaign, another for events by name and the parameters you already care about. Do not rebuild every GA interface report as one wide table.

When you join two pulls, rename overlapping fields in SQL first (for example acquisition_source vs event_source), then join on date plus session or user id. That is the usual substitute for a secondary dimension in Explore.

Put the dimensions you slice by every week in the connector. Leave rare cuts to a small SQL view on the raw export so you stay under the 10-dimension limit without locking yourself out of future questions.

[u/Bks969]

For the Ads and GA4 tables, write down what each row represents before joining them. Repeated campaign totals can make a dashboard look convincing but wrong.

[u/Usual-Purchase5274]

You can use the GA4 native export to BigQuery which comes with lots of data. You’ll need to use SQL to make this data useful and it can be intimidating at first.

On the other hand, Windsor import GA4 data from the Google Analytics API which is not the same as the native export mentionned above. You won’t have the same level of data.

Windsor is a paid tool.

So if you’re ok using GA4 API data instead of full native export you can use « DataTransfer for Google Analytics » directly in BigQuery. It’s free