Reshoper 2024: New opportunities in analytics

At the Reshoper conference, I had the opportunity to give a talk where I summarized new opportunities for e-commerce analytics. In the presentation, I shared my experience and approaches on how to get the most out of Google Analytics 4 — especially when combined with BigQuery and other Google Cloud services.
GA4 has been around for about three years now, and one thing has become clear — it’s not exactly a favorite among many users. Even after all this time, GA4 still has a clunky web interface built on an unfinished modeling engine, inconsistent naming (even for basic dimensions), and API limits that make it harder for people who want to build their own dashboards easily.
In reality, many companies have already lost patience with GA4, and this has accelerated the adoption of the one area where GA4 truly shines — using it as a data collection tool thanks to its free integration with BigQuery, while processing the data internally. This approach allows you to build reports where you know exactly what you’re looking at — without relying on outputs from a modeling black box.
It also unlocks the next level: the ability to bring not only web data into BigQuery, but also media and customer data — all in one place, clean and ready to use (instead of being scattered across multiple tools). This enables full-funnel insights, from ad impressions, through on-site behavior, all the way to paying customers. And most importantly, it lets you understand what actually drives the money hitting your business account.
In the presentation, I broke down this concept and shared examples of reports built on top of such data. I also explored interesting ways to leverage GA4 data across other Google Cloud services — for example, how combining GA4, Cloud Run, and Firestore can help push more first-party data into ad platforms for targeting, ultimately improving campaign performance without increasing media spend.