Can I use the new analytic property(web + app) to visualize reports in the google data studio?

Our product contains web and app, earlier both app and web data collection with one google analytics property. From these data, we got customized reports on google data studio. In that time it was possible because that mobile application fired events by using google analytics SDK, (This has integrated by using same property to web and app)but with the migration to firebase SDK, google analytics need to modify property by web + app property to get mobile and web raw events.

Can I use the new analytic property(web + app) to visualize reports in the google data studio? The problem is how do I create a view with this new property to connect google analytics into data studio as a data source.

Without linking firebase to BigQuery how can we integrate firebase google analytical data to google data studio

Upvotes: 2

Answers (3)

webdevbyjoss

Reputation: 524

It would be perfect to get the data from Google Analytics App+Web property right into Google Data Studio with all the pre-computed and pre-aggregated metrics you can find in the Google Analytics Dashboard. But that is not something offered by Google at the moment.

See: https://support.google.com/datastudio/thread/14674991?hl=en

The Google Analytics - Google Data Studio legacy data flow scheme looked like this:

[your apps + WEB] => Google Analytics => Google Data Studio

With a newly introduced Google Analytics App+Web property you no longer have access to Google Analytics data directly from Data Studio, but you can try and visualize records from BigQuery. The new data flow could look like this:

[your apps + WEB] => Firebase Analytics => BigQuery => Google Data Studio

Mobile apps and WEB apps SHOULD be updated to send events to Firebase Analytics. Then the integration with Google Analytics and link with BigQuery should be activated in Project settings of Firebase Dashboard to get data flow to BigQuery. The Google Data Studio offers a BigQuery connector and that is how you can visualize your data.

You can refer to this topic that nicely describes the setup: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/enable-bigquery-export-google-analytics-app-web/

The API and data format is changed, so here is another good compilation of materials that describes the changes related to Google Analytics App+Web: https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-query-and-calculate-ga-app-web-event-data-in-bigquery-a77931176d3

You will immediately face the following issues with this setup:

No historical data. At this point, Google team does not offer any way to migrate your old data neither from Google Analytics classic nor from Firebase SDK into a unified form that could be used in Google Data Studio reports. All events are transferred from the day of activating the BigQuery link.
No aggregations or pre-computed metrics. You are getting the RAW events, in a form they come from your app. You can't get the aggregated values or pre-computed metrics observed in classic Google Analytics, for example, the number of events per session or similar.
No migration of existing DataStudio reports. You will have to re-create all your Data Studio reports from scratch. There may be charts you will NOT be able to built now as there are no corresponding aggregated/computed metrics available.
Learn SQL. You can't build reports with point-and-click Data Studio experience as easy as before. Your events are stored in tables partitioned by dates, so you will need to do a table_* wildcard queries to get the data across different date/time ranges. Data is stored in entity/attribute/value form, so you will need to put an effort to get the insights you need from the RAW data.

UPD in 2021: Found a good writeup about all these challenges here:

https://ken-williams.com/guide/reporting-analysis/using-bigquery-and-data-studio-with-google-analytics-4/

Upvotes: 0