The sample dataset provides an obfuscated Google Analytics 4-property dataset that can be accessed via BigQuery. It’s a great way to look at business data and experiment and learn the benefits of analyzing Google Analytics data in BigQuery.
In this article:Access the dataset
BigQuery has a free tier which lets you query 1 terabyte per month and store 10 gigabytes (learn more about pricing). You can view your usage via Stackdriver and create alerts based on thresholds.
To access the dataset:
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If you're new to BigQuery (or you don't have a project set up yet) visit BigQuery sandbox.
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Once you have a project, use this link to access the dataset. Click View Dataset to open the dataset in your project.
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Click Query Table to run a query.
In the future you can access the dataset within BigQuery by selecting the bigquery-public-data project from the left-hand navigation panel, then select the events_ table under the ga4_obfuscated_sample_ecommerce dataset.
Where it comes from
The sample dataset contains obfuscated Analytics data from the Google Merchandise Store, a real ecommerce store. The Google Merchandise Store sells Google-branded merchandise. The data is typical of what you would see for an ecommerce website. It includes the following kinds of information:
- Traffic source data: information about where website visitors originate. This includes data about organic traffic, paid search traffic, display traffic, etc.
- Content data: information about the behavior of users on the site. This includes the URLs of pages that visitors look at, how they interact with content, etc.
- Transactional data: information about the transactions that occur on the Google Merchandise Store website.
Ways to use it
Because it provides Analytics data from an ecommerce website, the dataset is useful for exploring the benefits of exporting Analytics data to BigQuery via the integration. Once you have access to the dataset you can run queries such as those in this guide for the period of 2020-11-01 to 2021-01-31. For example to see the total pageviews the website received for 1-Jan-2021 you would query the dataset with:
SELECT SUM(totals.pageviews) AS TotalPageviews
FROM 'bigquery-public-data.ga4_obfuscated_sample_ecommerce.events_20210131'
Limitations
All users have viewer access to the dataset. This means that you can query the dataset and generate reports but you cannot complete administrative tasks. Data for some fields have been obfuscated such as fullVisitorId, or removed such as clientId, adWordsClickInfo and geoNetwork. “Not available in demo dataset” will be the returned for STRING values and “null” will be returned for INTEGER values, when querying the fields that contain no data.