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google-bigquerygoogle-analytics-4

Unioning data from tables to get over the 1 Million events daily export limit from GA4 to Bigquery

So we have run into the problem of hitting the 1 Million events daily export limit from GA4 to Bigquery in the free edition. GA360 is too expensive for us, so we are looking for any alternatives.

I was wondering if this is as simple as tracking different parts of the app in different GA4 properties (separate tables) so that each property stays within the 1 Million / day export limit.

Then all I have to do is union (combine) the data and store that as a consolidated view.

Solution

  • We ran into this challenge recently and now solved it but it took us some stress and guesstimation in making it work. While Google offers a great way to go around this, sadly their sites are not documenting this case well. I am going to explain how we went around the 1 million events limit with fully native solutions that will take you 10 mins to implement.

    • Go to Admin / BigQuery links / Your domain
    • If you're reading this post, you'll see that there is a warning on your events being > 1m
    • Under export types right below there is a daily export and a streaming export options
    • If you're within the 3 days grace period keep daily export option on, and also select streaming export (reason below)
    • If you're outside of the 3 days grace period and thus Google already paused your daily exports, unselect daily exports and select streaming exports

    Daily behavior:

    • If daily exports are still enabled when the daily export runs it'll create the events_$date table and delete the events_intraday_$date table. That's why for the first day it's ideal to keep the daily export option on. Otherwise your events_intraday_$date table will have partial data for the first day.
    • If daily exports are disabled, your events will be in events_intraday_$date table and you will not see any events_$date tables. In our experience the structure of the tables are the same (there might be some differences but for our purposes they were practically the same).

    Please note that Google is not being just difficult in offering this turnaround. You will incur some costs for streaming data, $0.01 per 200 MB to be exact (details here). For us this meant $0.05 / day for about 1m events so $1.5 / month; not remotely comparable to paying for GA.