GA360 is expensive and we felt like, for our use case, it would be too much. I was delighted to learn that Reflective Data can help us collect over 1M events per day in our BigQuery dataset for a fraction of the cost.Jurgita, Digital Data Analyst, Vilnius
GA360 is a great tool, and for the enterprises that can afford and justify the cost, probably the best analytics tool they can invest in. At the same time, many companies don’t have the budget to pay upwards of $150k for an analytics tool.
The challenge
One of the best features of GA4 over the previous version is that even the free version has the BigQuery export pipeline available.
The free version of GA4, though, has a limit on how many events can be exported each day. More specifically, this limit is set at 1M events per day. Barbora, like many companies with large traffic numbers, was reaching this limit in GA4 but at the same time wasn’t able to justify the cost of GA360.
The solution
At Reflective Data, we built a solution called Parallel Tracking for GA4.
Here’s how it works.
Parallel Tracking duplicates all HTTP requests going from your site or app to GA4 and sends them to Reflective Data’s processing endpoint.
Data is then processed just like GA4 does it and inserted into your BigQuery dataset. There is no limit on the daily event count with Parallel Tracking.
Schema for avoiding 1m event limit in GA4
Getting started with Parallel Tracking is easy as 1, 2, 3.
Step 1: Tracking code modification
After signing up for Parallel Tracking, you’ll have to enable it by modifying your GA4 implementation. We have plug-and-play solutions for Google Tag Manager, gtag.js, Measurement Protocol and most other implementation methods that GA4 has.
Step 2: Pipeline activation
In order to activate the pipeline, all you need to do is provide Reflective Data with a Google Cloud Platform Service Account key file. After providing the key file, GA4 data will start flowing into your BigQuery dataset.
Step 3: Querying the data
Once the pipeline is active, you can start querying your GA4 data just like with the default GA4 to BigQuery data export.
Conclusion
If your daily event volume in GA4 is close to or exceeds 1 million then you have two options. Upgrade to GA360 or implement Parallel Tracking. If the event volume exceeding 1 million is the only reason you’re looking to upgrade, Parallel Tracking is likely a better option as it is several times more affordable compared to GA360.
Ending with another quote from the customer here.
I guess you could say we were your average enterprise with LOTS of legacy data infrastructure that had been built over many years. This system was extremely complex and very expensive to maintain. When Reflective Data came in, they acted as true professionals, worked very closely with our IT and came up with the plan that pleased everyone.Today, being on the new cloud-based data infrastructure for almost a year now, I can say with all certainty that this project was a success. Not only are we saving tens of thousands of dollars every month on the infrastructure alone, the amount of hours it takes to maintain the system has gone from hundreds down to a ten or so. This has huge impact on our business. Implementing anything new would’ve taken at least 6 months with the old system, now it’s a matter of week or two to get everything up and running.
Last but not the least, Reflective Data saved us another $150k year as we no longer needed to use GA360 and instead implemented their Parallel Tracking solution for GA4.
Daria, VP of Marketing, Warsaw
It’s feedback like this that makes us love the work we do even more! Get in touch and learn how we can help you, too.
For more case studies, see here.