News that Google will be adding Universal Analytics user IDs to BigQuery's export schema.

Good news for any Google Analytics Premium customer who has linked their Analytics account with BigQuery!

From tomorrow, Google will be adding Universal Analytics User ID as a value in BigQuery.

For reference, here is the current Google Analytics to BigQuery Export Schema.

For background and information on User ID in Universal Analytics, take a look at another blog by yours truly HERE!

Perhaps the biggest selling point of BigQuery and the ability for Google Analytics Premium customers to export their data to it daily is the premise of linking online and offline customer journeys.

To link individual customers in your CRM to users in Google Analytics, you’d need to have a common user ID in each. This would allow you to identify users in your CRM and the interactions that they made online which were tracked by Google Analytics:

If you are interested in getting this kind of thing set up, please do get in touch!

Historically when Google Analytics data is exported to BigQuery, user IDs weren’t included as part of the export and so weren’t available in your BigQuery Google Analytics data.

As a workaround for this, you had to set the User ID as a custom dimension to be able to retrieve the value in BigQuery and link data from separate sources.

Now that the User ID is to be included in the Analytics exports to BigQuery, a custom dimension is no longer required (unless you want to see the user ID value in the Google Analytics interface too).

Details:

The addition of user ID will not be retroactive so the user ID will not be available in hits exported before 2nd December 2015.

Another important thing to note is that the user ID will only be available in BigQuery tables that are exported from user ID enabled views in Google Analytics.