[GA4] Best practices for User-ID

Best practices

It is recommended that you do not register a user ID as a custom dimension.

Creating unnecessary high-cardinality custom dimensions, like User ID, negatively impact your reports and explorations, and cause data to be condensed under the (other) row. Instead, use the User-ID feature.

Analyze user-based data

The following describes features you can use to interact with and analyze user-based data:

Use case

Feature

I want to explore segments of users and drill into individual user activities.

User Exploration

I want to monitor user properties as they are collected, troubleshoot issues as issues arise, and understand a user's behavior as the user explores my website or app.

DebugView

I want de-duplicated reporting based on user ID.

Verify the reporting identity

In GA4, with User-ID in the reporting identity, User ID de-duplication is present across all reports.

I want to compare users who are signed in with those who aren't signed in. Compare signed in with non-signed in users

I want to create remarketing audiences based on user IDs.

Create remarketing audiences based on User-ID data
I want to see user-level data by user ID.

BigQuery Export

GA4 BigQuery Export has both Client ID (user_pseudo_id) and User ID (user_id) in the schema.

I want to join my Analytics data with first party data (e.g. CRM data) so I can measure offline key events. BigQuery Export
I want to run additional analysis on my GA4 data (e.g. run ML models) and import the insights back into Google Analytics. BigQuery Export and Offline Event Data Import

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