How to replicate the 'Conversions | Goals | Reverse Goal Path' report

As a Google Analytics user you are probably quite attached to the default reports in the user interface of Universal Analytics. It can be hard to make sense of the data in the BigQuery export tables.

Let me enable you to replicate the reports you're familiar with. I'll try to keep it basic here.

Reverse Goal Path report

In the Conversions | Goals | Reverse Goal Path report you'll find data about goal completions, segmented by goal completion location and previous location steps 1, 2 and 3.

Let's query!

select
  goal_completion_location,
  goal_previous_step_1,
  goal_previous_step_2,
  goal_previous_step_3,
  count(distinct case when regexp_contains(goal_completion_location, r'/ordercompleted') then session_id else null end) as goal_1_completions,
from
  (
  select
    hits.page.pagepath as goal_completion_location,
    lag(hits.page.pagepath, 1) over (partition by fullvisitorid, visitstarttime order by hits.hitnumber asc) as goal_previous_step_1,
    lag(hits.page.pagepath, 2) over (partition by fullvisitorid, visitstarttime order by hits.hitnumber asc) as goal_previous_step_2,
    lag(hits.page.pagepath, 3) over (partition by fullvisitorid, visitstarttime order by hits.hitnumber asc) as goal_previous_step_3,
    concat(cast(fullvisitorid as string),cast(visitstarttime as string)) as session_id
  from
    `bigquery-public-data.google_analytics_sample.ga_sessions_20160801`,
    unnest(hits) as hits
  )
group by
  goal_completion_location,
  goal_previous_step_1,
  goal_previous_step_2,
  goal_previous_step_3
having
  goal_completion_location not in (goal_previous_step_1, goal_previous_step_2, goal_previous_step_3) and goal_1_completions >= 1
order by
  goal_1_completions desc