I am considering using Google Analytics (GA4) to handle the query clickthrough logs for a website's site search engine. But I'm not sure if this is viable, from a scalability standpoint. Basically, I'm planning to use Google Tag Manager to fire a GA4 event every time a user clicks a search result. The event sends query/clicked-document tuples to GA4, and then I can recover the logs by using an "exploration" to view the queries and the documents people clicked on.
The thing that concerns me is that this set of data will get fairly large over time. It's not a super busy website, and as such the search engine doesn't see tons of traffic. But I expect on the order of 5000 queries per week, each with a few clicked documents. Many of the queries are likely to be repeats.
From a technical standpoint, this will work, and it will give me the information I need in the resulting logs. But I'm not familiar enough with Google Analytics to know if this kind of use is supported, and what the long-term implications of doing it are. Any thoughts on likely problems?
So far, I have built out a prototype of this clickthrough log in GTM and GA4 and it seems to work great. The question is whether it will continue to function in the long term.
Thanks very much.
If you are worried about volume in the future, you can always link your GA4 to BigQuery and leverage that platform for your analysis.
Depending on what volume of data, you may/may not even require a paid license/project and be within the limits of the free connection.