September 13, 2017 — OWOX BI Pipeline: Creating sessions based on hit data

We're excited to introduce a new feature in OWOX BI Pipeline Google Analytics to Google BigQuery Hit Based Session Data collection!

OWOX BI now provides an opportunity to collect unsampled, raw session data based on the hit data in Google BigQuery.

Before, session data tables were created based on the data from Google Analytics. Sessions were therefore defined according to the logic provided in Google Analytics.
This approach ensures the maximum consistency of the session data between Google Analytics and Google BigQuery. However, the approach has its drawbacks:

• In projects with large amounts of traffic, Google Analytics may apply sampling. The Core Reporting API response may therefore contain sampled data. This means that a part of information about sessions may be missing in Google BigQuery. You might have seen "The data is sampled" notification before.
• Session data is updated with a delay of more than 24 hours, depending on the data updates provided with the Google Analytics API.

The new approach allows you to group user interactions into sessions using the OWOX BI sessionization algorithm, without having to depend on the sessionization algorithm in Google Analytics. This approach enables projects to get raw session data, regardless of the data volume.

During the Alpha, when you create a new Google Analytics to Google BigQuery pipeline, both sessionization algorithms will be working simultaneously. 

Sessions creation and updates:

More information about data collection and updates, limits of alpha version limits and pipeline details are provided in our Help Center.