E-commerce webanalytics solution

How we unified GA4, Google Ads, and Search Console in Dataform for true product analytics

In e-commerce, seeing beyond “traffic” means connecting data from every digital channel — not just knowing that a product is visible, but understanding how it performs in organic search (SEO), paid campaigns (SEM), and on-site conversion.
This project was designed to break the country-or-channel silo, enabling unified product analytics across SEO, SEM, and website behavior for all our countries at once.

🧩 Project Overview

The goal:
Create an integrated analytics platform that joins Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Ads, and Search Console data for product-level insights, covering all markets.
Key objectives:

  • Analyze product performance in organic search (Search Console), paid ads (Google Ads), and website behavior/conversions (GA4).
  • Enable merchandising, recommendations, and assortment decisions based on real data — not guesses.
  • Optimize ad budgets toward the products and categories with the highest ROI.

☁️ Architecture at a Glance

Architecture stack overview:

  • BigQuery: All analytical tables (nested & repeated fields; ~35M rows) — product, event, stock & price history.
  • Dataform: Data modeling, orchestration, and incremental loads; custom scopes for events, items, and content grouping.
  • GA4 Export: Unified schema for all projects and countries, including e-commerce data and custom channel grouping.
  • Google Search Console: Visibility and click data, product-matched.
  • Google Ads: Campaign costs, conversions; changes ongoing for full product-level matching.
  • Dashboarding: Aggregated views for category managers and marketers.

🔄 From Raw Sources to Unified Product Insights

Data Ingestion & Storage

  • Weekly exports from GA4, Search Console, and Google Ads into BigQuery, using Dataform’s incremental logic to avoid duplicates and maximize query efficiency.
  • Product, stock, and price history stored as STRUCT/ARRAY types, leveraging nested fields for massive row count reduction (~35M vs. 175M in legacy designs).

Data Modeling & Transformation

  • Event and item scopes implemented in Dataform, allowing detailed analysis by channel, content group, and custom dimensions.
  • Unified product info combined with ad spend/clicks and SEO visibility.
  • Currency conversion and multi-country logic established; assertions handle duplicate transactions, bot traffic, and missing consent.

Quality & Observability

  • Dashboards include tracking quality checks: e-commerce event completeness, pages with high bounce rates or 404 errors, and data consistency between sources.
  • Automated tests verify item/event coverage across all domains each week.

    📊 Reporting & Impact

    With integrated data, we gained:

    • A single view of product performance across SEO, SEM, and UX for all markets, not just one at a time.
    • The ability to identify top-converting items and shift ad budgets in real time.
    • Improved merchandising — data-driven recommendations for assortment and promotions.
    • Greater tracking observability: faster detection of data gaps, broken pages, bot issues.

    🚀 What’s Next

    Planned improvements:

    • Full rollout of Search Console integration for all product SKUs.
    • Data-driven attribution enhancements using advanced models in Dataform.
    • More automated observability checks (consent, bot, currency anomalies).
    • Optimization of Google Ads transfer for deeper product-level analytics.

    💡 Takeaways

    This integrated stack now gives the team the ability to analyze and act on real product-level data from every major channel.
    Instead of manually switching queries and reconciling exports for each country, we have a unified, scalable solution — one that supports marketing, merchandising, and tracking teams across the business.
    It’s a major step forward for e-commerce analytics.

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