Making GA4 data cheaper to work with in BigQuery

Original: Reducing BigQuery Costs - Clustering the GA4 events table - Analytics Ninja

Analytics Ninja

May 29, 2025

5 min read

Tutorial

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Technology Foundations

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Reducing BigQuery Costs - Clustering the GA4 events table - Analytics Ninja

Summary

This article provides insights on how to reduce BigQuery costs by clustering the GA4 events table. It covers key data warehousing concepts like partitioning, clustering, and query optimization to help data professionals manage their BigQuery usage and costs more effectively.

Who This Is For

Analytics Engineers

Data Engineers

Marketing Analysts

Key Takeaways

Cluster GA4 tables by event_name to reduce BigQuery scanning costs when building analytics tables
Use Google Workflows to automatically cluster tables as soon as GA4 exports arrive
Set up event-driven workflows that work across multiple GA4 properties with no code changes
Run UPDATE queries after clustering specification to actually organize existing data

Tools & Technologies

BigQuery Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Google Workflows Google Cloud Platform PubSub Cloud Functions

Topics Covered

data-warehousing bigquery cost-optimization data-clustering

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Read Full Article on www.analytics-ninja.com

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