You’re buying traffic, spending decent budgets, and reports look fine:
• Conversions are coming in
• ROAS looks okay
• Google says one thing, Facebook another — classic
Then small issues pile up:
• CRM orders with no source
• GA4 shows a spike in (direct) at checkout
• Meta overreports conversions
• Same user shows up 3 times in BI
• 40% of users “start” on the thank-you page
Ask someone who’s used to raw data and they’ll say:
“No click_id, no session_id, no user_id, no timestamps, broken UTMs — nothing to stitch. We’re blind“.
“We need raw data”.
It sounds like a technical issue. It’s not. It’s the foundation.
Raw data means:
• Full event-level logs
• Real user journeys
• Exact timestamps
• Traffic source details
• IDs to link clicks to sessions and users
Without this, you can’t:
• Build your own attribution logic
• Stitch users properly
• Break free from GA4 and Ads limits
• See the full path to conversion
Yes, you can look at polished GA4 dashboards or Amplitude reports.
But they’re built on aggregates — with sampling, gaps, and black-box logic.
Without raw data, you’re working with someone else’s version of the truth.
Want to get attribution right? Start with real raw data, not vibes.
If you work with GA4 to BigQuery exports, be sure to check out my SQL cheat sheet.
