Google Analytics is used by most marketing functions for statistical reporting, but it has limitations such as flexibility, performance issues, and sampling problems. The authors of the blog post moved their Google Analytics data to ClickHouse, a real-time data warehouse supporting SQL, which provided query flexibility, fast analytics, and infinite retention. They achieved this using BigQuery's export feature to transfer data to ClickHouse Cloud, and implemented various optimizations, such as materialized views, projections, and dictionaries, to improve performance and scalability. The solution costs less than $20 a month and can store around 110 years of data for a site the size of clickhouse.com, making it an attractive alternative to Google Analytics for organizations with large datasets.