Google Analytics for Firebase in BigQuery without exported ga data

Question

Currently, we have an app that uses Firebase, with Google Analytics enabled, and linked to BigQuery. The firebase account is on the Spark program.

In BigQuery, I can see the event-based schema, with fields around events and users and a few additional things like geo.

I am not sure what I need to do to get the session-related data in BigQuery, with things like session.visitId (found it referenced as part of ga_analytics_* table that I am missing). Does this require enabling the Blaze plan and export the google analytics data to BigQuery? Is this the reason why I am not seeing the session related fields in BigQuery?

If that is the case, what is the event-driven data model that I am currently seeing called in the Firebase context?

Answer 1

Firebase Export to BigQuery has a specific schema. In the docs the tables are in the form events_YYYYMMDD (this could be the event-driven data you asked for) and session.visitId is not listed as a field.

The field visitId seems to belong to Google Analytics BigQuery Export whose table is in the form ga_sessions_YYYYMMDD. Firebase docs specify that if your Firebase project is on the free Spark plan, you can link ... Google Analytics ... to the BigQuery sandbox, so, it should be feasible to access the ga tables in the sandbox. It is possible that an additional step is missing to get ga tables exported to BigQuery.