Devrun
October 30, 2024
October 2024 brings a range of significant updates to Google Analytics, particularly for Google Analytics 360 users. These updates focus on improving data accuracy, expanding export capabilities, enhancing unsampled data features, and improving tag diagnostics and deep linking functionalities. Whether you're managing large datasets or optimizing mobile app deep links, these digital analytics updates will enhance your ability to gain actionable insights and improve overall performance. Let’s dive into the key changes introduced this month in chronological order.
Google Analytics now provides recommendations to fix misconfigured deep links in apps. This feature ensures that deep links send users directly to the correct in-app content, improving the user experience and increasing conversions.
Benefits of Google Analytics updates:
In addition to misconfigured links, Google Analytics highlights missing deep links. This recommendation appears if you've linked your Google Ads account to your Analytics property and have an active app data stream. Missing deep links can result in lost conversions when users are directed to the web version instead of the app. Let's see how you can ensure users are taken to the app for a more engaging experience, maximizing conversions.
Google Analytics increased data export limits for reports and explorations, allowing users to export up to 10,000,000 cells in TSV and CSV exports for unsampled explorations and 100,000 rows of data in CSV or Google Sheets downloads. Here some benefits using it:
Google Analytics introduced the Realtime Pages Report, allowing users to monitor website and app activity in real-time. This report includes a key metrics summary, a bar graph of active users per minute, and a breakdown of active users by page path.
Benefits of Realtime Pages Report:
Google Analytics expanded the Tag Diagnostics tool with new features, including diagnostics for tags that have stopped sending data or are positioned too low on a page.
Use this tool for faster troubleshooting of tagging issues that could affect data accuracy to improve tag placement for better website performance. There is an easy access to the Tag Diagnostics tool through Google Tag Manager or Google Ads.
Google Analytics introduced the ability for editors and above to save segments for all users within a property. This feature allows segments to be saved either within an exploration or from the Segments page in the Admin panel. Here the benefits:
Google Analytics 360 users now have access to significantly more unsampled data within the platform and through the API. Daily quotas have increased to 20,000 tokens per property, while per-query tokens have increased to 5,000.
Benefits in Google Analytics 360 new feature:
This feature allows users to explore data without sampling, ensuring more accurate reports for large datasets. Requests for unsampled data can be made directly from the Explore section in Google Analytics.
Key Features:
Google Analytics 360 users can now request unsampled explorations for more accurate insights. These explorations act as static snapshots of the data at the time of the request for more accurate insights with unsampled explorations and quick processing and improved decision-making based on complete data:
The BigQuery export for Google Analytics was updated to include additional session-level traffic source fields. This enhancement incorporates cross-channel data and integration-specific contexts, aligning with the detailed data accessible within the Google Analytics interface. These newly included fields facilitate more thorough channel analysis and have been automatically appended to all current Google Analytics BigQuery exports, making them immediately available for user utilization.
Each Google Analytics 4 property and linked Firebase project adds a dataset named "analytics_<property_id>" to your BigQuery project. The dataset stores daily event tables, named events_YYYYMMDD, created if daily export is enabled. With streaming export, an events_intraday_YYYYMMDD table records events throughout the day and is deleted after the daily table completes. Analytics updates daily tables up to three days post-event to account for data latency, ensuring accurate timestamps. Events arriving beyond this period are not included.
Google Analytics launched a benchmarking feature allowing businesses to compare their performance against industry peers. Benchmarks, provided in percentiles, help identify strengths and weaknesses to guide improvements.
This feature uses peer groups based on industry categories assigned during setup and verified by signals such as URLs and app attributes. All benchmarking data is encrypted for privacy, with strict thresholds ensuring data quality. Benchmarks are updated every 24 hours, providing secure, industry-level insights for better business performance comparisons.
The October 2024 updates in Google Analytics offer significant improvements in data analysis, export capabilities, and tag management. The expanded data export limits allow users to work with larger datasets, providing deeper MarTech insights and more accurate reporting. The introduction of unsampled explorations and enhanced tag diagnostics ensures more precise data collection and management. Additionally, the focus on deep link management in apps helps streamline the user experience and increase engagement.
By staying up to date with these enhancements, businesses can make more informed decisions, improve their analytics processes, and optimize their digital strategies for better performance. To learn more about optimizing user behavior tracking, check out our detailed article, which explores Google Analytics best practices for analyzing how users interact with your website, helping you gain valuable insights and drive higher conversions.
