Google Analytics is a very popular tool for those customers that want analytics insights for their website or apps, without building their own data analytics system or big data platform.
In some cases, Google Analytics(GA) report/dashboards or its reporting api are not matching our needs perfectly. Hence we did some research to investigate how to ingest GA raw data.
Solution 1: Google Analytics 360
GA 360 supports features that export session and hit data into Google BigQuery. But the biggest challenge is that GA 360 price starts from US$150000 per year. This may be one concern for small or startup companies.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3437618?hl=en
Solution 2: Third party tool.
Snowplow: https://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2018/02/08/warehousing-google-analytics-data-api-vs-hit-level-data
Solution 3: Custom code to implement export ga raw into Bigquery. Some examples found.
http://dmitriilin.com/exporting-data-google-analytics-google-bigquery/
http://daynebatten.com/2015/07/raw-data-google-analytics/
Inspired by the above articles, we are able to send the raw hit level data to GA and another destination (e.g. BigQuery) at the same time. Then we can continuously copy data from BigQuery into Blob Storage through Azure Data Factory. The data flow is as below:
