Integrate GA4 Data with Snowflake for Useful Analytics and Activation
A Step-by-Step Guide
Make the Most of Your GA4 Data in Snowflake
GA4 and Snowflake are a natural fit for data modeling, business intelligence and data activation – especially for retail brands interested in optimizing their overall business performance, acquisition and retention marketing programs, and merchandising and fulfillment operations decisions.
GA4 is the latest version of Google Analytics, providing advanced features for tracking and analyzing user behavior across websites and apps. It emphasizes event-driven tracking, machine learning insights, and a more user-centric approach to understand customer journeys. GA4 aims to offer a more comprehensive and flexible analytics solution compared to its predecessor, Universal Analytics. Snowflake enables every organization to mobilize their data with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Customers use the Data Cloud to discover and securely share data, power data applications, and execute diverse AI/ML and analytic workloads. Together, the software application and cloud data tooling provide business and data practitioners with an opportunity to analyze and optimize web analytics, digital marketing analytics and behavioral event data to drive profitable growth.
Connect to GA4
The first step toward useful, modeled GA4 data in Snowflake is to connect the source and destination systems. There are many legacy tools available in market that handle the ETL or ELT transfer of GA4 data to Snowflake, and there are emerging tools that accomplish this transfer while providing value-added services like local data logging, and semantic data labeling and mapping along the way – making GA4 data modeling, analytics and activation easier once the data is landed in Snowflake.
To connect to GA4, follow these easy steps
Open SoundCommerce in any browser. Open the “Intelligent Pipeline” application from the top right navigation menu. Select “Sources” from the left navigation menu. Choose “Add New Source” from within the Sources pane to open the data source library.
Search or browse to find “GA4” within the data source library.
Complete the “Connection Setup” form with your credentials and token to securely connect to GA4 and begin collecting source data.
Log GA4 Data for Flexible Modeling in Snowflake
There are a few more considerations to address along the way. First, what happens if GA4 is unavailable for some reason, or the data you’re expecting has been purged by GA4? What happens when GA4 changes their API schemas and data scope? What happens if you need to reinterpret your GA4 data for a new use case in the future?
You’ll want your GA4 data immutably logged locally, just upstream of Snowflake to ensure you have the data and data flow flexibility you need to future-proof your GA4 data and models. SoundCommerce provides permanent logging of GA4 data upstream of Snowflake to ensure failover and future-proofing. Regardless of how you connect your GA4 and Snowflake data, you’ll want a data lake or event log in the middle to ensure data integrity and modeling flexibility.
Define and Label GA4 Data for Snowflake
As new technologies arise and best practices evolve, traditional integration tools like ETL and ELT data pipelines are giving way to intelligent pipelines that help prep data for Snowflake starting at ingest. Simply moving JSON from GA4 to Snowflake leaves all the work for your data team in Snowflake.
As you onboard your GA4 data into Snowflake, you’ll want to create semantic labels and metadata that describe the GA4 data for easier unification and modeling across other systems and data in Snowflake.
There are third-party solutions that will catalog your GA4 data and generate semantic labels and mappings after you’ve landed it in Snowflake. With SoundCommerce, the GA4 data is defined and labeled on its way into Snowflake instead, to avoid this costly rework later. You’ll end up with business-ready entities like orders, customers, products and campaigns, making it much easier to model your GA4 data in Snowflake.
Map GA4 Entities to Snowflake
Once the raw GA4 data has been organized into useful entities, it’s time to map the GA4 data into useful tables in Snowflake.
Why do defined and labeled entities from GA4 matter so much? The main reason is that GA4 data needs to be combined with data from other SaaS and on-premise software systems in useful ways. Landing raw GA4 data in Snowflake without this semantic understanding means data engineering and analyst teams must do all of the heavy lifting regarding the meaning of the GA4 data and the standardization of the meaning of that GA4 data from scratch in Snowflake.
Defining, labeling and mapping the GA4 data on the way in means much less effort once the data is landed in Snowflake.
Materialize GA4 Data in Snowflake
Next, you’ll establish a secure connection to Snowflake:
Select “Destinations” from the left navigation menu. Choose “Add New Destination” from within the Destinations pane to open the data destination library.
Complete the “Connection Setup” form to securely connect to Snowflake to establish a secure destination for your labeled, mapped and modeled data.
That’s it! You now have logged, labeled and mapped data from GA4 flowing securely to Snowflake.
Model GA4 Data in Snowflake
Once you have well-formed entities from GA4 onboarded to Snowflake, it’s time to build useful analytical and behavioral models on the GA4 data – and combine the GA4 data with data sets from other systems in Snowflake for more advanced, cross-dimensional analysis.
You can build your own analytical models on the GA4 data in Snowflake using languages like SQL and Python, organized into model libraries in tools like DBT or Coalesce. With SoundCommerce, you get prebuilt analytical models for GA4 running in Snowflake, with ready access to the model source code in DBT.
Host the Modeled GA4 Data in Snowflake for Analytics
Snowflake supports reporting and visualization through a wide variety of analytics tools including Sigma, Tableau, Looker, Power BI and Microstrategy to name a few. You can build your own dashboards, tabular views and graphs in any of these tools to reveal insights about GA4 in your Snowflake models. SoundCommerce provides pre-built embedded reports in Sigma to reduce the time, cost and risk of BI reporting of GA4 data out of Snowflake – so you can start making better decisions and taking better action as soon as you’ve connected GA4 to Snowflake.
Host the Modeled GA4 Data in Snowflake for Campaign and Customer Activation
Whether your marketing team uses GA4 for activation – or uses other tools and channels or both to take action on the data – you’ll want to be able to easily move your modeled GA4 data in Snowflake to your most important marketing applications.
If you’ve followed the steps above to properly onboard and model your GA4 data in Snowflake, it’s easy to use reverse ETL (rETL) tools like Census or Hightouch to orchestrate the data from there, or use SoundCommerce native orchestrations to push data into common channels and applications like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Braze, Klaviyo, Insider or Dynamic Yield to put the GA4 data in Snowflake to use!
Getting Your GA4 Data Defined, Labeled, Mapped and Modeled in Snowflake is Easy!
SoundCommerce can automate the steps necessary to bring GA4 data into Snowflake, addressing the key functions of raw GA4 data logging, GA4 semantic definitions and mappings, and pre-built GA4 data models that are analytics- and activation ready in Snowflake.
Contact us today to get started with GA4 in Snowflake!
Technical Resources for Integrating
GA4 Data with Snowflake
More information and technical specifications for data collection from GA4 is available at:
More information and technical specifications for data ingest into Snowflake is available at: