Your GA4 BigQuery export just stopped. No error message, no warning—just gaps in your data. If your WooCommerce store hit around 1 million events yesterday, GA4 didn’t throttle or queue the overflow. It paused entirely. And those missing events? They’re gone.
GA4’s free tier has limits most store owners discover the hard way. When exploration reports query more than 10 million events, sampling kicks in (GrowthNirvana, 2025). But BigQuery exports face a harder wall: exceed the daily limit significantly, and exports stop until you fix the problem. Previous days don’t get reprocessed.
Why High-Traffic WooCommerce Stores Hit This Limit
A typical WooCommerce page generates multiple GA4 events: page_view, scroll, click, and any enhanced ecommerce events like view_item or add_to_cart. A busy product page might fire 5-10 events per visitor. During Black Friday 2024, stores with 100,000 daily visitors easily generated 500,000+ events—and that’s before remarketing pixels, site search, and form interactions.
The math catches up fast. A store doing 200,000 sessions during a sale can hit 1 million events before lunch. When that happens, GA4 doesn’t notify you. Your BigQuery tables just stop updating.
The frustration compounds because GA4’s interface keeps working. Standard reports populate normally. You only notice the problem when BigQuery queries return incomplete data—or when your Looker Studio dashboards show suspicious gaps.
You may be interested in: GA4 BigQuery Export Data Does Not Match: The WordPress Store Owner Survival Guide
Your Three Options When Limits Hit
When GA4 BigQuery exports pause, most store owners scramble. Google’s documentation points to three paths, each with significant tradeoffs.
Option 1: Filter Events (Lose Data)
You can configure GA4 to exclude certain events from BigQuery export. Common candidates: scroll events, outbound clicks, or low-priority interactions. The problem? You’re choosing which data to sacrifice. For ecommerce, scroll depth might reveal where product pages lose buyers. Outbound clicks might show customers leaving for competitor pricing. There’s no “safe” data to discard.
Option 2: Upgrade to GA4 360 (Expensive)
GA4 360 enterprise removes export limits and offers unsampled reporting. The cost? GA4 360 enterprise version offers higher limits at significant cost—typically $50,000-150,000+ annually depending on data volume (GrowthNirvana, 2025). For most WooCommerce stores doing under $5M revenue, this price makes no business sense. You’d spend more on analytics than many stores spend on total marketing.
Option 3: Direct BigQuery Pipeline (Own Your Limits)
What if GA4’s quota wasn’t your problem? Server-side tracking can capture WooCommerce events at the source and stream them directly to BigQuery. Your only limit becomes BigQuery pricing—and with 10GB free storage and 1TB free queries monthly, most stores won’t hit meaningful costs.
This approach bypasses GA4 entirely for BigQuery data. You still get raw event data, you still build reports in Looker Studio, but you’re not subject to Google’s arbitrary event quotas.
How Direct BigQuery Streaming Works
When a customer places an order on your WooCommerce store, the event data exists in WordPress before GA4 ever sees it. Server-side tracking intercepts this data at the WooCommerce hook level—when the order is created, when payment completes, when shipping calculates.
The difference is fundamental. GA4’s JavaScript runs in the customer’s browser, subject to ad blockers, Safari ITP restrictions, and network issues. Server-side tracking runs on your infrastructure, capturing events with 100% reliability.
From there, events stream directly to BigQuery via the Streaming Insert API. No GA4 middleman, no daily quotas, no unexplained export pauses. Your data pipeline scales with BigQuery pricing—which for most stores means pennies per million events.
You may be interested in: WooCommerce Revenue vs Google Analytics: Why GA4 Is Always Wrong and How to Fix It
The Cost Reality: GA4 360 vs Direct Pipeline
Let’s put real numbers on both approaches for a WooCommerce store generating 2 million events per day (a busy but not enormous store during peak seasons).
GA4 360 path: $50,000-150,000 annually, plus implementation consulting, plus ongoing contract requirements. You’re locked into Google’s ecosystem and pricing changes.
Direct BigQuery path: BigQuery streaming inserts cost approximately $0.01 per 200MB of data. At 2 million events averaging 2KB each, that’s roughly 4GB daily—about $0.20/day or $73/year in insert costs. Add query costs and storage, and a high-volume store might spend $200-500 annually on BigQuery.
The gap is staggering. GA4 360 costs 100-300x more than direct BigQuery streaming for the same data access.
What You Keep (and What You Give Up)
Bypassing GA4 for BigQuery data doesn’t mean abandoning GA4 entirely. Most stores run both: GA4 for standard reporting and audience building, plus direct BigQuery streaming for unlimited raw data access.
What you keep with direct streaming:
- Complete event data: Every page view, purchase, and interaction—no sampling, no quotas
- Real-time availability: Events appear in BigQuery within seconds via streaming inserts
- Schema control: Your event structure, your naming conventions, your data ownership
- Predictable costs: BigQuery pricing is transparent and scales linearly
What you give up:
- GA4 modeling: Behavioral modeling and attribution in GA4 requires events in GA4. Direct BigQuery data is raw.
- Built-in audiences: GA4 audience builder needs GA4 events. You’d build audiences via BigQuery queries instead.
For stores that primarily use BigQuery for raw data analysis and custom dashboards, this tradeoff makes sense. GA4 handles marketing integration while BigQuery handles deep analysis—each doing what it does best.
How WooCommerce Stores Actually Implement This
Transmute Engine™ is a first-party Node.js server that runs on your subdomain—not a WordPress plugin that adds load to your store. The inPIPE WordPress plugin captures WooCommerce events and sends them via API to your Transmute Engine server, which formats and routes them simultaneously to GA4, Facebook CAPI, Google Ads, and BigQuery.
The BigQuery piece is just one destination. The same event that records a purchase in BigQuery also fires to Facebook CAPI for attribution and GA4 for standard reporting. One event capture, multiple destinations, no GA4 quotas limiting your data warehouse.
Key Takeaways
- GA4 free tier pauses BigQuery exports when daily limits are significantly exceeded—no warning, no retroactive fix
- GA4 360 removes limits but costs $50,000-150,000+ annually—prohibitive for most WooCommerce stores
- Direct BigQuery streaming via server-side tracking costs ~$200-500 annually for high-volume stores
- You can run both: GA4 for marketing features, direct BigQuery for unlimited raw data access
- The event data exists in WooCommerce before GA4 sees it—capture it at the source
When your daily events significantly exceed the limit, GA4 pauses the BigQuery export entirely. It doesn’t queue events or reprocess missed days—you simply have gaps in your data. You won’t receive a warning before this happens.
Yes, but you’re choosing which data to lose. Common approaches include excluding low-value events or sampling, but both mean incomplete data. For ecommerce stores, every purchase, add-to-cart, and page view matters for attribution.
GA4 360 typically costs $50,000-150,000+ annually depending on data volume and contract terms. This removes export limits but requires enterprise-level commitment and often mandatory consulting packages.
Yes. Server-side tracking can capture WooCommerce events and stream them directly to BigQuery using the Streaming Insert API. Your only limits become BigQuery pricing—not arbitrary Google quotas.
Ready to own your data pipeline? Learn how Transmute Engine streams WooCommerce events directly to BigQuery—no quotas, no gaps, no $50K annual fees.
