The Latest GA4 Updates: Everything You Need to Know

Google added ecommerce dimensions and metrics to the custom reports builder, enabling you to create your own ecommerce reports from scratch or edit standard ecommerce reports.Google also introduced new revenue metrics in explorations, enhancing Explorations for ecommerce use.

For ecommerce website owners and advertisers, you can now create reports specific to your ecommerce insight needs that can placed directly in GA4’s report list for easy access. You can create a custom report by visiting GA4’s reporting Library, then selecting “Create new report”, and “Create detail report”.

You can now set a default value for a key event. This way, if the ‘currency’ and ‘value’ parameters are unset for the key event, Google Analytics uses the default value you set.

This allows you to assign monetary values to your key events, helping you calculate the impact of these events on your business, return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS), and calculate the value of a website lead.

Google introduced calculated metrics to GA4. With calculated metrics, you can adjust any metric to fit your business needs or logic. These metrics are often more actionable than default metrics, helping in decision making.For example, you could create metrics to show discount percentage applied to an ecommerce item, or shipping revenue as a percentage of purchase revenue.

Google added additional item-scoped dimensions to the audience, segment and custom report builders, allowing you to configure audiences, segments and custom reports using a wider range of dimensions. This enhances your ability to segment your audience and configure custom reports, allowing you to gain more insight into product performance and use that data to better your engagement with audience members.

8 new platform-agnostic traffic source dimensions were added by Google, which enhances your ability to analyse user behaviour and performance in cross-channel reporting cases. These are:

• Manual source
• Manual medium
• Manual source / medium
• Manual campaign name
• Manual campaign ID
• Manual term
• Manual content
• Manual source platform

Google announced a name change for your business-critical measurement events, from “conversions” to “key events”. This change was rolled out gradually from this date, and made it easier to differentiate the business-critical events in Google Ads with their GA4 counterparts. Whilst the change was largely visual, with no action required from GA4 users, some GA4 features were removed or changed as part of the rollout, such as the “Conversions” report.

Google introduced a new Audience report, which enables you to identify your most engaged and profitable audiences.

GA4 begun supporting match types, including ‘begins with’, ‘exactly matches’, and regex.

GA4 begun showing a new recommendation for consent mode when Google tags or a consent management platform are likely blocking cookieless pings in certain implementation scenarios.

The Checkout journey report was introduced to GA4, which shows pre-defined steps users take during the checkout process on your ecommerce website. This was a report available in Universal Analytics, that was missing from GA4 at launch.

An option was added to exclude Google signals data from reports and explorations, reducing the chance of data thresholding occurring. This means that more of GA4’s aggregated reports are based on 100% of available data, and data sampling is less likely to occur, improving the accuracy of the data shown.

Data redaction was added to GA4, which enables you to configure client-side redaction of potential PII. This reduces the chance of PII being submitted to Google’s servers.

Google adds a recommendation to install the Google Analytics mobile app to the GA4 UI.

Google enhanced automatically collected events from web data streams in Google Analytics 4 to solve a filtering issue for some subproperties.

Google improved the accuracy of its data sampling in GA4, reducing the likelihood of encountering the (other) row in GA4’s reporting. A toggle to turn comparisons on and off was also added to GA4’s reporting.

The preset data ranges in Explore were changed, dynamically changing the date range based on when you open the Explore, not when it was created. A warning was also added to GA4’s UI when a property exceeds event collection limits.

Google added a new in-property help menu to GA4, which changes dynamically based on the current page in view.

A recommendation to add any unlinked Google Play app to GA4 was added, if Google identifies an unlinked app on your Google account.

Google introduced trend change detection to GA4 that identifies subtle, long-lasting changes in the direction of data. This can assist with insight generation and reporting.

The Advertising section in GA4 is updated. The Reports section now provides insights into how users engage with websites and apps to improve product and user experience. The Explore section, Custom reports and the Data API now also provide behavioural insights, and insights from ads campaigns.

The primary channel group is introduced, an editable channel group that allows you to configure rule-based definitions for different marketing channels.

GA4’s real-time reporting was updated, and now shows the users active on your website within the last 5 minutes, as well as the last 30 minutes.

Custom event data importing became supported, which enables the analysis of imported event data using field and custom dimensions to join the data.

Following the introduction of key events, key event rate metrics were added to the user acquisition and traffic acquisition reports, enabling easier access of these metrics and removing the need to customise standard reports or go into Explore.

The Advertising section of GA4 was improved, allowing you to see segments of users eligible for remarketing and ads personalization in Google Ads.

Google enabled the use of audience exports for first-party segments using publisher provider identifiers, in Google Ads.

The ability to create and apply Analytics audiences, including predictive audiences, directly in Google Ads was added.

Google reworked the way user data import functioned in GA4, meaning that data imported and joined via a user ID or client ID is immediately added to existing GA4 audiences, if users who meet the conditions for an audience are present in the import.

Google allowed users to view and delete established links between Google Analytics 4 properties and AdSense accounts.

Google enabled you to integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud with a Google Analytics 4 property from the Sales Marketing Cloud interface. This lets you use audiences created in Analytics in Marketing Cloud, particularly useful for Salesforce email and SMS direct-marketing campaigns.

Improvements were made to GA4’s integration with Google AdSense. You can now establish links between the two platforms directly in GA4.

Salesforce was added a data import source, meaning you can now import data directly into GA4 from Salesforce.

Behavioural modelling was introduced to GA4’s path and funnel reports, both aggregated and in Explore. Behavioural modelling fills the data gaps caused by users who decline analytics cookies based on the behaviour of similar users who accept analytics cookies.

The removal of first-click, linear, time decay and position-based attribution was announced, leaving data-driven and last-click as the remaining attribution models. This increased our reliance on data modelling for attribution, with data-driven being the default and most common selection.

User-ID collection was removed as a requirement to collecting user-provided data from a website or app. This removed the need to send a user-ID when collecting user-provided data, instead relying on a hashed user-ID generated by Google, using the user-provided data.

GA4’s attribution modelling was updated, which improved the accuracy of conversions being attributed to paid search, and resolved an issue that would occasionally attribute paid search conversions to organic search.

Google made it mandatory to have a configuration command or Google tag present on a web page in order to send automatically collected GA4 events. This fixes an issue which could cause (not set) values to appear in GA4’s reports.

User data export was introduced to BigQuery. You can now create a new set of tables, where each row represents a unique user, showing user-scoped fields for modelling and analysis.

Item-scoped custom parameters became available in the GA4 BigQuery Export, enhancing ecommerce analysis potential in BigQuery.

You now send string parameter values of up to 500 characters from web data streams with a GA 360 property, supporting URL and UTM data collection.

New reports were added to Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360, and Search Ads 360, alongside new traffic source dimensions to populate these reports.

Linking subproperties and roll-up properties to Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360 was enabled.

You can now share a subset of data from a subproperty, or a superset of cross-property data from roll-up, with Search Ads 360 or Display & Video 360.

The event parameters limit for GA 360 properties was increased to 500 characters in length, up from 100. This allows the collection of longer event parameter values.

Universal Analytics 360 features became no longer supported for all traffic, including real-time reporting, API, and real-time BigQuery export, whilst advertising features were disabled for traffic from the European Economic Area.

A new API was introduced to the Google Marketing Platform, which enables users to upgrade and downgrade properties between standard and Analytics 360, and link GA4 accounts to organizations.

A recommendation was added to link any unlinked Display & Video 360 advertiser to GA4.

In Analytics 360, functionality to assign users and groups to report collections became available, meaning you can customize report collections for different user bases.

Floodlight linking for GA4 subproperties and rollup properties was added, as it can be done for standard GA4 properties.

Google added the ability to include Google Marketing Platform groups in the eligible recipient list when sending reports by email directly from GA4.

Event dispatching ordering fields were added to the BigQuery event data export, which allows you to see the precise order of the events sent during an event collection batch, something that could not be done previously.

Google added additional UTM fields to the BigQuery event export, manual_creative_format, manual_marketing_tactic, and manual_source_platform, which enhances channel analysis in BigQuery.

Additional session-scoped traffic source information was added to the BigQuery export, Google Ads, and manual campaign context information, which enhances channel analysis in BigQuery.