Imagine seamlessly integrating your Google Analytics data with Snowflake, allowing you to combine it effortlessly with other key sources like CRM, ERP, social media metrics, email campaign data, and whatever data sources compose the full scope of your data estate. The good news is that it’s possible with the native Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics, now generally available. 

​​Google Analytics, a tool widely used by marketers, provides invaluable insights into website performance, user behavior and critical analytic data that helps marketers understand the customer journey and improve marketing ROI. This new connector offers immediate access to your Google Analytics data without the hassle, complexity and expense of manual integration via API endpoints and patched systems workarounds. 

Developed using the Snowflake Native App Framework, the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics enables robust security and reliability, removing procurement hurdles and allowing marketers to operate from a robust marketing data foundation that helps them drive meaningful, personalized and cost-efficient marketing campaigns.

The Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics makes it a breeze to get your Google Analytics data, either aggregated data or raw data, into your Snowflake account. Here’s a quick guide to get started: 

1. Navigate to Snowflake Marketplace, locate the Google Analytics connector of your choice (either Aggregate or Raw Data), and click “Get” to enable it in your Snowflake account. 

2. Establish a connection with your Google Analytics account, choosing between OAuth or Service Account.

3. Select the specific Google Analytics properties you want to replicate, define their destination in Snowflake, and set up the synchronization schedule. That’s it! Your data will now automatically refresh within your Snowflake account based on your preferred frequency. 

Marketers can access their raw Google Analytics data, in just a few clicks, directly in the Snowflake Data Cloud to leverage a comprehensive data set and a true 360-degree view of the customer in Snowflake. 

By unifying their behavioral, product and marketing raw data with the rest of their enterprise data, organizations are able to realize the full potential of their data across a number of use cases:

• Customer 360: Collect analytics data from various platforms, devices and channels, unifying it at a user level in Snowflake. Users leave event data trails, which when aggregated with financial, CRM and operational data in the Data Cloud, surfaces valuable insights for understanding customer journeys and running personalized campaigns.
• Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): With Google Analytics data in Snowflake, marketers can better understand user journeys by consolidating information across diverse touchpoints, enabling more accurate marketing decisions for optimized performance and attribution.
• Churn prevention: With raw GA4 data in Snowflake, marketers can pinpoint churn drivers. By analyzing user behaviors holistically, marketers can identify patterns and preempt timely interventions to enhance user experience and minimize churn.
• Next Best Action: Combining Google Analytics data with native AI and ML capabilities in Snowflake unlocks Next Best Action by surfacing insights derived from comprehensive user interactions, and driving prescriptive recommendations about optimal channels, messages and outreach tactics to optimize engagement and ROI.

With raw and aggregated Google Analytics data available directly in Snowflake, marketers can maximize the full potential of their marketing data while simultaneously working with a platform that is agnostic to closed advertising ecosystems and that represents cross-system interoperability and openness. This allows organizations to choose to work with best-in-breed solutions, liberating them from closed ecosystems that dictate which integrations are frictionless for them, and limiting which systems they can use to optimize their investments. Fundamentally, Snowflake isn’t an advertising company, nor does it have an advertising business, and so is fully impartial to which ad ecosystems and solutions are optimal for your business. 

The Snowflake Native Connector for Google Analytics represents a paradigm shift for organizations seeking to access their Google Analytics granular event-level data for advanced analysis in Snowflake. Previously, organizations lacked flexibility and choice in where their GA raw data resided, and the systems that could harness the full power of that data. If customers wanted access to their raw data in Snowflake, they were forced to build complex ETL pipelines extracting the data into files and moving it across several storage layers and systems. Such pipelines are costly to maintain, insecure once data is moved, and prone to failures and errors. The connector changes that! 

The data is transferred directly from where it resides to your Snowflake account and encrypted in transit. When dealing with aggregate data, the connector uses Google Analytics 4 API to retrieve the data. In the case of raw data, it replicates it directly from the BigQuery storage layer. There is no other infrastructure used in between, which greatly simplifies data governance, and allows for optimal security and minimal latency. Once your data reaches its final destination, access to the ingested data is governed by Snowflake’s built-in access controls. The connector is a fully-managed service that requires minimal oversight. Natively built inside the Data Cloud using the Snowflake Native App Framework, the connector leverages built-in security and reliability capabilities.

You can get historical data loads or incremental updates from any number of Google Analytics properties with equal ease. The connector can synchronize millions of new events with a latency of just a few minutes, but in the end you control how frequently you want the data to be refreshed depending on your business needs. Monitoring the state and performance of the replication is easy thanks to available logs and email alerts.

Website analytics provide invaluable insights into the performance and effectiveness of online campaigns, both paid and organic. By leveraging data on user behavior, traffic sources and engagement metrics such as page views and conversion rates, marketers can make better informed decisions to optimize their strategies. These analytics help identify which channels are driving the most valuable traffic, allowing companies to allocate resources effectively. 

Moreover, understanding user demographics and preferences enables the tailoring of content and advertising efforts to target audiences, enhancing overall campaign efficiency. Now, with your Google Analytics data available seamlessly in the Data Cloud, Snowflake continues to help you build a single source of truth that can be the foundation of your business and marketing engine. 

But don’t just take it from us. Multiple organizations of all sizes and across many industries are uncovering new value for their marketing organizations with the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics. Here is one customer success story that shows the real-world impact of this new feature.

Netsertive is a digital marketing solution for multi-location marketers who are responsible for driving local profit. In essence, Netsertive uses website analytics as a compass, guiding digital marketers toward a data-driven approach that not only maximizes their online presence, but also provides them a better return on investment. 

Netsertive uses website analytics as an essential piece of its digital marketing offerings, powering localized insights into campaign performance by leveraging data on user behavior, traffic sources, and engagement metrics. All of this helps its customers make more informed decisions, optimize their marketing strategies, and better allocate resources. Understanding demographics also helps marketers better tailor their content, enhancing campaign efficiency. 

With the significant transition from Universal Analytics to GA4 last year, there was a great deal of confusion in the market about what the future would look like for website analytics, and how to ensure marketers would have access to all the data they needed. Netsertive was thrilled to help Snowflake create the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics because it provided a great solution to consolidate this very granular data into the Data Cloud quickly and efficiently for our customers. 

Snowflake and Netsertive share a similar mindset when it comes to scaling and working with massive data sets, and by working together, they were able to seamlessly pull thousands of analytics properties into Snowflake. Having all of this information available in a single place helps to drive innovation and speed when combining website analytics with all of the other datasets Netsertive has at the ready, equipping local businesses to be able to make decisions based on data in ways only previously available to large corporations with teams of data analysts.

Ready to supercharge your marketing analytics? Try out the Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics by installing it from Snowflake Marketplace. It comes with no additional licensing costs and uses Snowflake credits for compute and storage. 

Dive into the product documentation for more details and start unlocking the full potential of your marketing data today. And if you want to learn more about both the Raw Data and the Aggregate Data connector, please register for our demo webinar, which you can view on-demand.