How to create and set up the GA4 event-based web streaming

This article describes event-based web streaming setup steps.

Getting started requirements

• You are using the Google Cloud Platform and have an active project. And you have a BigQuery Admin or BigQuery Data Owner role (how to set up GCP).
• OWOX BI Streaming is available in your plan. If it’s not, write to your OWOX manager (bi@owox.com).

 

Step-by-step setup

Step 1. On the Workspace page, click the ‘New’ button and select the Streaming option in a drop-down menu:

Or, if your workspace page is empty, you will see a screen with three major blocks. Click the ‘+ New streaming’ button.

 

Step 2. As a streaming type, select ‘GA4 Event-based web streaming’:

 

Step 3. The new event-based streaming has been successfully created in ‘Draft’ status. To start collecting user behavior data from your website, you'll need to configure streaming settings, including the timezone, and destination dataset.

 

Step 4. Set up a timezone.

4.1. Click on the ‘Timezone’ section.

4.2. In the opened dialog, specify the timezone

4.3. Click the ‘Save’ button to apply your changes.

4.4. If all is done correctly, the dialog will close, and in the ‘Timezone’ section you will see a green marker with the timezone title.

 

Step 5. Set up a destination dataset.

5.1. Click on the ‘Destination dataset’ section.

5.2. In the opened dialog, where you can choose one of the shared datasets in the list. If this list is empty, or you didn’t find the desired dataset, you can click the ‘Grant access…’ button and add a new dataset following the instructions.

5.3. Click the ‘Save’ button to close the second dialog.

5.4. If all is done correctly, the dialog will close, and in the ‘Destination dataset’ section you will see a green marker with the name project.dataset.

 

Step 6. Activate this pipeline by clicking on the ‘Activate’ button.

The streaming will change status from ‘Draft’ to ‘Active’.

 

Step 7. Open the 'Data sending options’ section.

Choose how to send data from your website to the OWOX BI access point and follow the instructions below:

• Instructions on how to configure your GTM container
• Instructions on how to change the standard gtag.js file
• Instructions on how to send events from your server

 

The final step. After successfully setting up the data-sending process to the OWOX BI access point and initiating it, you will see the first ‘events_intraday_YYYYMMDD’ table in your BigQuery dataset.

If you have any questions about streaming setup steps, please reach out to us at bi@owox.com.