You Ask, I Answer: Source/Medium for Google Analytics 4 in Data Studio?

In today's episode, Jakes asks, I've moved five sites to Google Analytics 4, set up a host of custom events and tag manager to recreate what I'm missing from GA3, but where do I find source medium campaign data in Google Data Studio with GA4? Am I missing something obvious? Yeah. Uh it's not there yet. Um, which seems like a bit of an oversight.

Uh in fact, uh Jake went on to uh ask this exact question. Let's uh flip around here. He asked this exact question to Google, and a Google employee said it's still in preview, it's not there yet. Um the fields themselves may not be available in the API. Well, that's not helpful since source medium is kind of one of those critical things you want to know.

So the question then is what can we do to solve this problem? Um is the data just not there? Is something oh what's going on? So there's a couple different ways to handle this. First, let's figure out is the data there.

So we're gonna go into Google Analytics. One of the functions that we have access to, it is in the advanced setup. Um you have access to Google BigQuery, which is Google's cloud database. And if you have a Google Cloud account setup, which I would strongly encourage you to set one up, it doesn't cost you any money out of the gate, it just costs storage time and money over time. Um, you can connect a Google uh BigQuery database to your Google Analytics.

Now this is advanced stuff, um, but for the purposes of at least just being able to see the data, I think it's essential. So in BigQuery, I went into my database and just started looking at what's in the table. And we see for every single interaction, you get these dozens and dozens and dozens of parameters, right? So this is the raw data from from Google Analytics. This is one of the reasons, by the way, why Google Analytics 4 will eventually be the gold standard for Google Analytics deployments because it's really hard to top this like pure raw data.

It's wonderful. What you'll notice here is that there is traffic source name, medium, and source. So source medium and name is in there, which is a campaign. This is a good thing. It's kind of interesting.

And the you have the platform, whether it's web or app. So the data is there. Um, it's physically present, which means that we could get it into Google Data Studio. The challenge is just going to be how do we get it into Google Data Studio? Well, one of the things that we can do in Data Studio is bring in a data uh a BigQuery database natively.

So I've got my Google Analytics 4 data here, right? We can see it's it's right there. And as Jakes was saying, uh, when you look in the fields that are available, yeah, source medium totally absent, right? It's not it's just not there. So how do we do this?

How do we get source medium data at all? Let's go ahead and add some data. I'm gonna add Google BigQuery, and we're gonna choose my BigQuery project. Oops. And then choose my non not my real-time database, but my regular database.

And look, as we've been talking about in previous videos, Google Analytics 4 really is Google Firebase, right? And so there's a an existing Firebase template already set up for us. We add that to our data source, add it to our report. And now let's go ahead and make a new chart. And now for our chart, we've got our Firebase database here instead of Google Analytics, right?

So let's go ahead and we've got our event date there. And instead of offset, uh let's do unique users. And now you see acquired source, acquired medium, acquired campaign. Now we're starting to be able to see those different uh variables. So let's go ahead and uh add in sources of breakdown dimension.

Looking good, right? Now we can start to see more clearly where our traffic is coming from. And there are our major sources. And if this is difficult to read, you can obviously switch the visualization to anything else that makes sense to you. But now we've got our source medium data in here from Google Analytics the hard way, right?

Um using the big query database instead of the fact that the API does not have the data in it. Now, this is a workaround, let's be clear. This is a workaround, and it is an inconvenient workaround. Um I would expect, based on the Google employees' response, that this will not be the state of things going forward, right? This is while they figure out how to build all the pieces that need to be built to surround the Google Analytics ecosystem.

This is the workaround. I would hope that this is not permanent because this is silly. But if you are deploying Google Analytics 4 right now, it is in your interest to do the BigQuery integration and to have the BigQuery database available and collecting data so that if you do need to report on your GA4 data for some reason, um, because it's not right clearly for every business to be using right now. But if you did need to do that reporting, you have the option to pull in the big query data and report on it natively within Google Data Studio. This also speaks to the fact that Google Analytics 4 in its entirety is part of the ecosystem with tag manager, analytics, and data studio is not ready for prime time yet.

It is not something that you should be using as your system of record for your marketing data. Should you have it? Yes. Should you have it turned on? Yes.

Should you be collecting data? Yes. Should you be relying on it for your mission critical reporting? No. Not if you're gonna have to keep doing um you know hacks and workarounds like this just to get the data out of uh the platform or be pulling data straight out of your your BigQuery database.

Now, should you be doing advanced analytics and building on it? Probably, because what you see in BigQuery is the raw data, right? It is the raw data, and that schema is well established as we saw it's already it's already established, it's been established, it's Google Firebase. Um, and thus you could feel pretty confident in building code on top of the Firebase database. But should you be relying on the GA4 API?

Definitely not. Alright, so the workaround for bringing it to Data Studio is to use Firebase, the Firebase database until the GA4 API gets updated within Google Data Studio. That will give you the ability to visualize the stuff a little more easily. Um but know that the data is there. Right?

That's the important part. The data is there, so it will eventually be available so. So you can feel confident deploying Google Analytics 4 and knowing that it will collect all the data that it's supposed to be. And build all those custom events as Jake's was talking about. Get all those custom events set up in Tag Manager so that you're tracking all things you want to be tracking.

Because remember, it's never retroactive. And then as the product matures, as the infrastructure overall of the Google marketing platform matures around Google Analytics 4, you'll be able to do more and more with less and less headache. So that's the answer. It's a terrible answer, but that's the answer. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below.

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