LW IT Solutions
59 articles in this category
Follow this category by RSSEnabling the free daily GA4 export to BigQuery, understanding why the exported rows carry none of the sampling, cardinality bucketing or thresholding the interface applies, and writing a first query that reconstructs raw user paths from the nested event schema.
Seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, an ISO string and a date without a time zone all describe the same moment and are not interchangeable. Counting the digits identifies four of them – and the fifth is where a day goes missing.
A container sorts its list alphabetically and offers no other structure, which makes the first word of every name the only grouping there is. Renaming three hundred of them is safe for tags and triggers – and not for variables.
On 21 September 2026 GA4 added an Include mode to the hostname data filter: a list of approved domains, everything else is dropped. Events with an empty hostname are blocked automatically, Measurement Protocol events are exempt, and what the filter drops is never available in GA4 or BigQuery – so testing mode comes first.
Dot notation reaches any value in a nested push, and half of those paths break the moment the order of an array changes. Which half is decidable in advance – and one custom variable replaces twenty of the fragile ones.
An alert only fires when the drop is larger than the normal swing. On small numbers that means nothing short of a halving – and what helps against that is a longer interval, not a lower threshold.
Everything GA4 knows about a hit travels in one query string with sixty abbreviated parameters. Four groups explain almost all of them, and the e-commerce payload hides in a single field with two-letter codes.
BigQuery bills the bytes it reads, not the rows it returns. Which tables are opened and which columns are touched is decided by two details, and both are visible before the query is sent.
A migration path that keeps the existing client-side setup running: provisioning a tagging server, configuring the GA4 client to claim incoming requests, routing the web container through an own subdomain, and moving the purchase event off the browser entirely before anything is switched off.
A technical tutorial on building an automated statistical anomaly detection and alerting pipeline for GA4 using Google BigQuery and Looker Studio.
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