Forum Discussion
Source Online Product S3 Contents Accessed/Downloads (GA5)?
- 3 months ago
If my understanding is correct, you are looking for an option to track document "download" and "opened" events on your website/web app which contains a GA4 tag already, and you want to build that reporting in Power BI. In that case, whether GA4 can track those specific events is more of a GA4/product analytics question than a Power BI/Fabric one.
However, I'd like to share a few resources that would help you connect to GA4 from Power BI/Fabric:
- Connect to GA4 from Dataflow: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/connector-google-analytics (note: this is Dataflow Gen2/Import only — Data Factory pipelines in Fabric don't currently support Google Analytics as a source)
- Connect to GA4 from Power BI Desktop: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/connectors/google-analytics
One more thing — even if GA4 doesn't have that information, since your docs are stored in AWS S3 (I assume), I'm sure AWS would have those logs stored, and you can access that S3 bucket directly by creating a shortcut from Fabric OneLake. That way you don't need to build another pipeline to move the data from AWS to MS Fabric OneLake, and you can build reporting on top of it directly.
- Fabric OneLake shortcut to S3: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/onelake/create-s3-shortcut
- Connect to S3 from Dataflow Gen2: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/connector-amazon-s3
- Connect to Athena from Power BI Desktop: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/connect-with-odbc-and-power-bi.html
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Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is your best path. Because you cannot touch the product backend, you must rely on frontend tracking. GA4 features built-in Enhanced Measurement, which automatically captures a file_download event whenever a user clicks a link to an asset (like a PDF or Excel file), even if that file is hosted in AWS S3.
To report on this using your Fabric F2 capacity, do not connect Power BI directly to the GA4 API, as it is slow and hits quota limits. Instead, create a Dataflow Gen2 in Fabric to extract the GA4 file_download events daily, land the data into a Lakehouse, and build your Power BI report on top of that. If GA4 isn't tracked properly on the frontend, your only other option is to ask DevOps to enable AWS S3 Server Access Logs, which you can pull into Fabric via a OneLake Shortcut to report on exact file downloads.
Note: This architecture and connector approach relies on current Microsoft Fabric Dataflow Gen2 and GA4 integration documentation.