Connect BigQuery

Want to know how shops discover your app before they install it? Connect BigQuery and PartnerConsole fills your Acquisition › Listing analytics page with your App Store listing activity: page views, the install funnel, ad clicks, and the exact search terms that lead to installs.

Here's how the data reaches you: Shopify sends your listing activity to Google Analytics, GA4 exports it to BigQuery, and PartnerConsole reads it from there. You'll set up that path once, and it keeps flowing on its own. There are no keys to create or download. You just give our reader account permission to read your data. It takes about ten minutes.

Before you start

You need two things in place on Google's side. If your listing already reports to GA4 and exports to BigQuery, skip straight to "Give PartnerConsole access."

1. Your listing reporting to a GA4 property. In your Shopify Partner Dashboard, open your app, go to Distribution › Analytics, and add a GA4 Measurement ID. (No GA4 property yet? Create one at analytics.google.com, one per app keeps things tidy.) Shopify then starts sending your listing's page views, install funnel, installs and ad clicks to GA4.

2. That GA4 property linked to BigQuery. In GA4, open Admin › BigQuery links and link it to a Google Cloud project, with Daily export turned on (add Streaming too if you want same-day data). GA4 creates a dataset named analytics_<property id> in that project. The first tables land within about a day.

That's the standard GA4 export. You're not doing anything special for PartnerConsole yet.

Give PartnerConsole access

This is the only step unique to us, and it's a single permission grant. No key files, ever.

In PartnerConsole, open Settings › Integrations › Google BigQuery. You'll see our reader account's email with a Copy button:

[email protected]

Now, in the Google Cloud console, open IAM & Admin › IAM › Grant access, paste that email as the principal, choose the role BigQuery Data Viewer, and save.

That's it! The grant is read-only. Our reader account can see your GA4 datasets and read their rows, nothing else, and it can never write. Granting on the whole project (as above) is easiest and lets PartnerConsole list your datasets for you. Prefer to keep it tighter? Grant BigQuery Data Viewer on just the analytics_<property id> dataset instead (open the dataset in BigQuery, then Sharing › Permissions), and you'll type the dataset id in yourself in the next step.

Connect it

Back in Settings › Integrations › Google BigQuery:

1. Enter your BigQuery Project ID (the Google Cloud project your GA4 property exports to) and save. PartnerConsole runs a quick connection test.
2. Each of your apps appears with a dataset dropdown. Pick the analytics_<property id> dataset that belongs to each app, and leave App Store Listing on. (Granted access on a single dataset only? The dropdown will be empty, so click enter manually and type the dataset id.)
3. Choose how often to sync (every 10 minutes is a good default) and save.

The first sync runs right away and pulls your full export history, from whatever date your export begins. Your Acquisition pages start filling in, and the integration panel shows the last sync time and how many events it has captured so you can watch it flow. A large history syncs in batches over a few minutes.

You never pay for the queries. PartnerConsole runs them in our own Google Cloud project, billed to us, not yours.

Got more than one app?

One connection covers all of them. Each app maps to its own dataset in the same project. When you launch a new app later, grant the reader account access to its dataset, reopen the panel, and map it. Nothing else to redo.

Troubleshooting

• The connection test fails. The reader account probably isn't granted BigQuery Data Viewer yet, or the Project ID is off by a character. Re-check the grant and the ID.
• The dataset dropdown is empty. That's expected if you granted access on a single dataset rather than the whole project. Click enter manually and type analytics_<property id>.
• No data after a day. Confirm the Measurement ID is set in your Partner Dashboard, and that GA4's BigQuery link shows recent export runs. The export only starts from the day you turned it on, Google doesn't backfill.