How to Create a Google Cloud Account for BigQuery

Creating a Google Cloud account takes about five minutes. Once you have one, you get access to Google BigQuery, Looker Studio, Cloud Storage, and every other Google Cloud service. You also get $300 in free credits to use across Google Cloud products.

Here is the step-by-step process.

Step 1: Go to Google Cloud

Open your browser and go to cloud.google.com. Click “Get started for free.” You will need to sign in with a Google account. If you have a Gmail account or a Google Workspace account, use that.

Step 2: Select Your Country

Google Cloud asks for your country to determine billing currency and applicable terms. Select your country and click “Agree and continue.”

Step 3: Choose Individual or Organization

This is an important decision. You choose whether your Google Cloud account is for individual use or for an organization.

Individual accounts are tied to one user. They are simpler to set up and work well for personal projects or small teams.

Organization accounts support multiple users. You assign roles to each user: owner, editor, or viewer. You also control which data each user has access to. Once you select the account type during sign-up, you cannot change it.

If you are setting up BigQuery for a marketing team or an agency, choose organization. It gives you user management and access controls from the start.

Step 4: Enter Payment Information

Google requires payment information to create a Google Cloud account, even for free-tier usage. You will not be charged immediately.

Google BigQuery gives you 10GB of storage and 1TB of query processing free every month. Google Cloud also gives every new account $300 in credits to use across all Google Cloud products during the first 90 days.

For most marketing teams, the free tier covers all day-to-day use. You are unlikely to be charged unless your data volume or query frequency is unusually high.

Enter your payment information and click “Start free.”

Step 5: You Now Have a Google Cloud Account

Once you complete the sign-up, your Google Cloud account is active. Google automatically creates your first project, called “My First Project.” A project is the container for all the resources you create in Google Cloud, including your BigQuery datasets and tables.

From here, you navigate to BigQuery by searching for it in the Google Cloud console, or by going directly to console.cloud.google.com/bigquery.

What to Do After Creating Your Account

Once your account is ready, the next steps for setting up BigQuery are:

Understand how organizations, projects, and billing work together. Each project is linked to a billing account. This structure matters when you manage multiple clients or multiple data environments.

Create a dataset in BigQuery. A dataset is a container for your tables. You create one dataset per data source or per client, depending on how you want to organize your data.

Connect your marketing data. Use a connector like Porter Metrics to load your ad platform data, GA4, and CRM data into BigQuery automatically.

You do not need to install anything. BigQuery runs entirely in the browser through Google Cloud console.

Connecting Your Marketing Data After Setup

Once your Google Cloud account is ready, Porter Metrics connects your marketing platforms to BigQuery in minutes. You authenticate your ad accounts, select your data sources, and Porter loads everything into BigQuery on a daily schedule. No code, no infrastructure management.