Higher ed analytics dashboard: Scalable, cost-effective and customizable

With GA4’s storage limitations and rising SaaS costs, institutions need cost-effective analytics solutions now more than ever. Instead of adopting expensive third-party platforms, we built a scalable, multi-department analytics dashboard tailored to higher ed’s needs using GA4, BigQuery, and Looker Studio.

We integrated free tools like Google UA, Search Console, Ads, YouTube, and Tag Manager. We supplemented our setup with Pope Tech, Editori11y, Microsoft Clarity, and Screaming Frog to replace expensive SaaS features.

As UA phased out, we transitioned to GA4, BigQuery and Looker Studio, ensuring long-term data retention and cost efficiency without sacrificing reporting capabilities.
This session will cover:

• How our UA + Data Studio dashboard started and what problems it solved
• Key web metrics needed by our 60+ departments and 19K pages
• How it evolved into GA4 + BigQuery + Looker Studio
• Implementing BigQuery to overcome GA4’s 14-month data storage limit
• How our custom-built solution avoided the need for expensive SaaS platforms

If your institution is considering a paid analytics platform, this session will help you evaluate whether you need one or if you can build one yourself better and cheaper.

We will also discuss the technical considerations, workarounds, and automation strategies that make this approach achievable, even for institutions without dedicated analytics teams.

Presenter

Robert McIntosh — University of Minnesota-Twin Cities