10 January, 2025 BY Oriol Ribó

Learn how to calculate users' purchase anticipation in Looker Studio with GA4 data.

For many businesses, understanding how far in advance users make purchases is key to analyzing their behavior and planning. This knowledge is especially valuable in sectors such as events, hospitality, services, catering... where anticipating customer decisions can make all the difference in strategic planning and resource optimization.

In this article, I will show you how to calculate this value using Looker Studio with a field that measures the difference in days between the purchase date and the session date. So for that, it will be essential to have an event parameter configured that tells us the session/booking date. 

*Let's assume that the session/booking date parameter is named session_date.

Step 1: Make sure your data is in date format

Before you begin, you need to confirm that both date fields (the date of purchase and the date of the session/booking) are set correctly as type "Date."

To verify:

  1. Go to your data settings in Looker Studio.
  2. Confirm that the Date (date of purchase) and the session/reservation date parameter are set to Date.
  3. If any of the fields appear as text or in a different format, change their data type to Date. If one of the fields is in text format (such as "dd/MM/yy"), you can convert it to date using the PARSE_DATE function. For this, create a new calculated field with the following formula:

PARSE_DATE("%d/%m/%y",date_session)

This step will transform the date_sesion field into a value recognizable as a date.

Step 2: Calculate the Anticipation in Days

Once both fields are correctly set as dates, you can calculate the anticipation in days between the purchase date and the session date.

To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Add a new calculated field by clicking on "Add a Field"
  2. Name the field, e.g., "Anticipated Days".

Enter the following formula to calculate the difference in days:
DATE_DIFF(PARSE_DATE("%d/%m/%y", date_sesion), Date)

Note that in this formula Date represents the date of purchase and date_sesion is the session date or the day for which the user has made the purchase.

Step 3: Interpretation of the results

If everything went correctly, the resulting value in the "Days in Advance" field shows us how many days before the session date the user made the purchase:

  • 0 means that the user purchased for the same day.
  • 1 indicates that the purchase was for the next day.
  • 2 or more positive values indicate that the user bought several days in advance.

With this calculated field we will be able to create tables or charts in Looker Studio to analyze user patterns and extract interesting insights.
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What are third-party cookies and why are they disappearing?

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The end of retargeting as we knew it.
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What alternatives does the market propose after the elimination of cookies?

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The end of third-party cookies is not the end of advertising or digital marketing.
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… will be the ones to take the biggest slice of the pie.

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