How to Use Google Analytics 360

Thinking about upgrading to Google Analytics 360 is a big step, giving your team access to a powerful suite of enterprise-level analysis tools. This guide breaks down how to use its most valuable features, helping you move beyond basic reporting to uncover the deeper insights that drive business growth. We'll cover everything from unsampled reports and BigQuery integration to advanced custom funnel analysis.

What is Google Analytics 360, and Why Is It a Big Deal?

Google Analytics 360 (GA360) is the premium, paid version of the standard Google Analytics 4 you're likely already using. While the core interface looks familiar, GA360 is built for businesses that handle large volumes of traffic and require more granular, accurate, and scalable data analysis. The key difference isn't just a few extra features, it's the removal of limitations that can hold growing businesses back.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the core benefits:

Higher Data Limits: Standard GA4 has limits on things like API requests, the amount of data processed in explorations, and the number of custom dimensions you can create. GA360 raises these limits significantly, allowing you to track and analyze much more detailed information.
Unsampled Data Reporting: This is a major one. When dealing with large datasets, GA4 standard sometimes uses a smaller subset of your data (sampling) to quickly estimate reports. GA360 provides programmatic access to 100% of your data, ensuring your most critical decisions are based on complete information, not approximations.
Advanced Integrations: The "out-of-the-box" connection to BigQuery is more robust, and it integrates seamlessly with other Google Marketing Platform products like Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Unlike the free version, GA360 comes with guarantees from Google on data collection, processing freshness (usually under four hours), and reporting uptime.

In short, GA360 is for when "good enough" data is no longer good enough. It's for when you need precise, unshakable insights to justify high-stakes marketing budgets and strategic decisions.

Unlocking an Accurate Story with Unsampled Reporting

One of the single most important features of GA360 is the ability to generate unsampled reports. Understanding this concept is fundamental to using the platform effectively.

What is Data Sampling and Why Is It a Problem?

Imagine trying to figure out the most popular pizza topping in a city. Instead of asking all one million residents, you poll 100,000 of them and then project those results. That's data sampling. For a simple question, it often works well enough. But if you wanted to know the favorite topping among left-handed people between ages 30-35 living in a specific neighborhood, your small sample might not give you an accurate picture.

The same thing happens in Google Analytics. When you request a complex report with a lot of data (millions of events), standard GA4 may sample the data to deliver your report faster. This can lead to inaccuracies, especially when you're looking at smaller, niche segments of your audience. A campaign that looks like a high performer in a sampled report might actually be a dud when you review all the data.

How to Access Unsampled Data in GA360

GA360 makes accessing unsampled data easy, particularly in the Explore section, where you build your most detailed reports.

When you create a report in Explorations (like a Funnel or Path exploration), you'll notice a green checkmark icon in the top right. In standard GA, hovering over this icon might show you that the report is based on a sample of your traffic. In GA360, this will nearly always be based on 100% of the available data due to much higher processing limits.

Furthermore, when running default reports, GA360 users can specifically request a downloadable unsampled report if needed, giving you guaranteed precision for high-stakes analysis, such as quarter-end performance reviews or annual budget planning.

Diving Deeper with Enhanced Explorations

The Explore section in GA4 is where true analysis happens, and GA360 supercharges its capabilities, allowing for more complex and granular investigations.

Building Advanced Custom Funnels

While the standard GA4 offers custom funnel reports, GA360 provides higher limits and more flexibility. For example, you can create funnels with more steps, apply more segments to a single exploration, and work with larger datasets without triggering sampling.

Let's walk through an example. Say you're an e-commerce brand that wants to understand the mobile checkout experience for users who came from a specific Facebook ad campaign.

Here’s how you’d build that funnel in GA360's Explore section:

Navigate to Explore and select Funnel exploration.
In the Steps section, define your checkout process:
- Step 1: Event = view_item_list (user views a product category)
- Step 2: Event = select_item (user clicks a product)
- Step 3: Event = add_to_cart
- Step 4: Event = begin_checkout
- Step 5: Event = purchase
Next, under Segments, create a new segment to isolate the specific users you want to analyze. Add conditions like:
- Session Acquisition source = facebook.com
- Session Acquisition campaign includes summer-sale-2024
- Device category = mobile
Apply this segment to your funnel report.

Because you're using GA360, this sophisticated, multi-step, multi-condition funnel will run on 100% of your data. You can now clearly see exactly where high-value mobile users from your Facebook campaign are dropping off. Maybe the begin_checkout step has a massive abandon rate specifically on mobile for users from that ad. This is a clear, actionable insight that might be missed or miscalculated with sampled data.

Connecting the Dots: Seamless BigQuery Integration

Perhaps the most powerful feature for data-hungry organizations is GA360's native, near real-time export to BigQuery, Google's serverless data warehouse.

Standard GA4 users can link to BigQuery, but they have an export limit of one million events per day. For large websites or active apps, this daily quota can be hit in a matter of hours. GA360 removes this limitation and provides a continuous, streaming export of every single event as it happens.

Why is this a game changer?

The Single Source of Truth: By pumping raw, unsampled data from GA360 into BigQuery, you can combine it with data from other business systems. Imagine joining your user behavior data with sales data from your Salesforce CRM, subscription data from Stripe, and LTV data from your internal database. This allows you to build a complete 360-degree view of your customer journey.
Run Incredibly Complex Queries: With raw hit-level data, you're no longer confined to the GA4 interface. Your data science team can run advanced SQL queries to build custom attribution models, perform predictive analysis (like identifying users at risk of churning), or analyze intricate user paths that exceed the capabilities of the Funnel exploration tool.
Own Your Data History: Data within the GA4 interface typically has a maximum retention period of 14 months for user-level data in Explorations. Your BigQuery data is yours forever, allowing for year-over-year analysis without any data loss.

Setting up the BigQuery Link

Connecting GA360 to BigQuery is surprisingly straightforward:

Go to the Admin panel in your GA360 property.
Under Product Links, click on BigQuery Links.
Click Link and choose the BigQuery project you want to export data to.
When configuring the data streams, select the Streaming export option to get your data in near real-time.

That's it. Within minutes, raw event data from your website and app will begin flowing into an organized dataset in your BigQuery project, ready for analysis.

More Than Data: Practical GA360 Roll-up Features

For large companies that manage multiple websites or international brands, organizing data can be a challenge. GA360 provides two key property types to make this easier: Roll-Up Properties and Subproperties.

Roll-Up Properties: These let you combine data from multiple source properties into one consolidated view. For a global brand, you could have separate GA properties for the US, UK, and German websites, and a Roll-Up property that instantly aggregates all their data, giving you a top-level view of global performance without any manual work.
Subproperties: These give you the opposite capability. You can take one large source property and create a smaller, filtered view of its data. For instance, an e-commerce company could have a single main property but give their blogging team access to a Subproperty that only contains data for the /blog section of the website. This lets different teams focus on the metrics that matter to them without being overwhelmed or having access to sensitive sales data.

Final Thoughts

Stepping up to Google Analytics 360 effectively means moving from estimation to certainty. By providing unsampled data, raising analytical limits, and offering powerful integration and organization tools like the BigQuery export and Roll-Up properties, it empowers businesses to make higher-quality decisions based on a complete view of their customer behavior.

Of course, having access to so much powerful data is just the first step, turning it into clear, quick insights is another challenge entirely. That's why we created Graphed. After linking your GA360 account, we allow anyone on your team to build dashboards and get answers just by asking questions. You can ask things like, "compare revenue from organic traffic vs paid traffic last month" or "show me my custom funnel conversion rate broken down by country," and have a live-updating dashboard in seconds - no need to wrestle with the Explore interface for every single question.