What's new in Google Analytics

This article provides information on the latest releases in Google Analytics for this year. For information on releases from past years, see the What's New archive.

Releases

October 28, 2024

Benchmarking

You can now use Benchmarks which are reference metrics that help you compare your business performance against the performance of other businesses in your industry. Benchmarks unlock the data you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your business, so you can take action to improve results.

With an extensive customer base on our platform, Google Analytics has the ability to surface benchmarks for businesses that are also using Google Analytics that are similar to yours.

Google Analytics offers benchmarks in percentiles (median, 25th, and 75th) based on peer groups of businesses for a wide range of industry categories. The businesses that form the peer groups are determined by an industry category assigned to each property. This industry category is determined by a combination of factors including the broad industry category provided in setup and signals from things like a property’s URLs and App attributes.

When you use benchmarking, your data is encrypted and protected, ensuring your data remains private and aggregated. Additionally, thresholds are in place to ensure that a minimum number of properties are included before benchmarks become available to a peer group. Properties must also have a minimum volume of users and be generating a minimum volume of meaningful data in order to be included in a peer group and contribute to its benchmarking metrics. This allows you to safely compare your business's performance against high quality industry standards, while also ensuring that your data is protected. Also, benchmarking data is refreshed every 24 hours.

Learn more about benchmarking

Benchmarking: How to compare your site/app to your peers

October 22, 2024

BigQuery export supports additional traffic source fields

The BigQuery export now includes additional session scoped traffic-source fields, including the cross channel and all other integration specific contexts.

This update enhances channel analysis within BigQuery and mirrors the same comprehensive access to the same data available within the Google Analytics UI. These new fields have been automatically added to all existing Google Analytics BigQuery exports, and are available for use immediately.

Learn more about BigQuery export

October 17, 2024

Saved segments

Editors and above can now save segments for all users within a property, either from within an exploration or the Segments page in Admin. These saved segments can be edited by any user with Editor or higher permissions. Learn more about segments

Using Segments in Google Analytics

October 14, 2024

GA360 unsampled quota enhancements and API

Google Analytics 360 users now have access to significantly more unsampled data in the interface and through the API. Daily quotas have increased to 20,000 tokens and per-query tokens to 5,000.

The token calculation algorithm has also been updated to better align with processing costs. This allows you to dive deeper into your data and uncover valuable insights that were previously hidden due to sampling limitations. Now, you can analyze your most complex queries and make decisions based on accurate, unsampled data. And a new machine learning-based model ensures fairer and more predictable quota charging for all users.

Learn more about the unsampled quota enhancements and the API changes

Request unsampled results dialog showing available quota and number of tokens required for the request.

October 11, 2024

New Tag Diagnostics

We've added the following new diagnostics to the Tag Diagnostics tool in the Google tag settings:

Tag has stopped sending data: This diagnostic appears when the Google tag has stopped sending data in the last 48 hours. To fix this issue, use Tag Assistant to check that the tag is correctly installed on each page of your website.
Tag found too low on page: This diagnostic appears when we've detected tags on your website that are positioned too far down the page. The placement of tags can significantly affect how quickly they load and activate. If tags are positioned too low, it can lead to signal loss, potentially impacting the functionality and performance of your website measurement. To fix this issue, fix tags not placed correctly.

Additionally, we've introduced the new tag quality status 'No recent data,' which appears when the Google tag hasn’t been detected in the last 48 hours. If you see this status, you may need to check your setup.

Learn more about Tag Diagnostics

October 9, 2024

Realtime pages report

The new Realtime pages report shows you which pages on your website or app are currently being viewed and how many users are on each page. Use this information to identify popular content, assess marketing campaign performance, and quickly address any website or app issues. Learn more about the Realtime pages report

Screenshot of Realtime pages report

October 3, 2024

Increases to data export limits for reports and explorations

We've increased the data export limits in Google Analytics to give you greater flexibility with your data. With this update, you can now export up to:

10,000,000 cells in TSV and CSV exports for unsampled explorations
100,000 rows of data when downloading reports as a CSV or Google Sheets

October 1, 2024

Misconfigured deep links recommendation

We now surface a recommendation to fix misconfigured deep links in your app if you have an app data stream, and your app has misconfigured App Links or Universal Links (i.e., the links are not successfully directing mobile users to the mobile app when they have the app installed).

To view the list of missing or misconfigured deep links and associated data, click the Download button and then open the CSV file. To implement or fix deep links, work with your development team and refer to Android and iOS documentation as needed.

Learn more about deep links

Fix to the Device model dimension

We've fixed an error on the Device model dimension that was incorrectly reporting browser information. Previously reported browser data will now be shown as "(not set)." The fix only affects data collected after October 2.

September 25, 2024

Improved user-provided data session attribution

We've fixed an issue that caused over-attribution of sessions to Direct, either when enabling user-provided data with automatic user data collection, or starting in late June to mid July for customers already using the feature before that date.

September 24, 2024

Improvements to GA4 Data Import

You can now create and manage multiple sources for each data import type, giving you greater flexibility and ability to handle complex data scenarios for your data import needs. Data imports will also keep your existing data intact while new data is seamlessly added or updated to avoid accidental overwrites.

You can access your data import quota information directly in the data import page within Admin.

Learn more about Data Import

September 18, 2024

Corrected Campaign Manager 360 attribution

This fix returns correct attribution for customers with properties linked to Campaign Manager 360 that were previously categorized as Google Ads traffic. The presence of a GCLID and DCLID was causing misattribution to Google Ads, and this fix corrects the issue resulting in attribution data being correctly attributed to Campaign Manager 360.

September 3, 2024

Report enhancements

You can now visualize up to 5 rows of data directly within your detail reports using plot rows. Simply select the desired rows and click Plot rows to generate a line for each row for quick comparison and analysis. Learn more about plot rows

Additionally, we've added these report features:

Anomalies in detail reports: Uncover hidden patterns and potential issues in your detail reports with anomalies. We now flag unusual data fluctuations in detail reports, helping you pinpoint unexpected traffic spikes, sudden drops, and other noteworthy trends. Learn more about anomalies
Report descriptions: Hover over any report title to reveal a brief description and a helpful link to learn more about the report.
Mark key events in the Events report: Identify your most important events by marking them as key events using the three dots menu at the end of the rows for events in the Events report. Learn more about the Events report
New Transactions report: Gain granular insights into your revenue streams with the new Transactions report. Get detailed information about each transaction from the transaction_id parameter. Learn more about the new report
Scope changes in acquisition reports: Get user-related metrics (such as Total users, New users, and Returning users) in the User acquisition report and session-related metrics (such as Sessions, Engaged sessions, and Sessions per event) in the Traffic acquisition report. Learn more about the acquisition reports

Corrected Display & Video 360 attribution

This fix returns correct attribution for customers with properties linked to Display & Video 360 that were previously categorized as Google Ads traffic. The presence of a GCLID and DCLID was causing misattribution to Google Ads, and this fix corrects the issue resulting in attribution data being correctly attributed to Display & Video 360.

August 27, 2024

Missing deep links recommendation

We now surface a recommendation to fix missing deep links in your app in order to increase conversions and improve your app’s engagement. The recommendations include a downloadable report of deep links to implement or fix, ordered by opportunity. Learn more about deep links

August 23, 2024

Improved session_start event firing

We now more completely process the session_start event when your property is linked to Google Ad Manager and you use the send_pay_view=false configuration. The change will help you more accurately measure user sessions.

July 19, 2024

Session traffic source information now available in the GA4 BigQuery Export

We've added a new record to the GA4 BigQuery Event export that contains the Google Ads and Manual campaign context information for each session present in the export. This information is repeated for every event in a session to enable fast and easy channel analysis in BigQuery of any event within a session. The exported data is the same as the data used in GA4 behavioral reporting.

Learn more about the BigQuery Export schema

July 17, 2024

Additional UTM fields added to the BigQuery Event export for advanced channel analysis

We've added three new fields (manual_creative_format, manual_marketing_tactic, manual_source_platform) to the traffic source record for more advanced channel analysis in BigQuery.

Learn more about the BigQuery Export schema

July 16, 2024

GA4 BigQuery Event Ordering additions for Web properties

We’ve added three new fields (batch_page_id, batch_ordering_id, batch_event_index) to the BigQuery Event export tables so you can replicate the browser's collection order for events exported to BigQuery.

Learn more about the BigQuery Export schema

June 27, 2024

Introducing Tag Diagnostics

With this update, we've added a new Tag Diagnostics tool to help you find and fix issues with your website's tags so you can ensure your data collection is accurate. You can access the tool from the Google tag settings and on the landing page of Tag Manager when issues are detected.

Learn how to troubleshoot tag issues with Tag Diagnostics

June 26, 2024

Improved attribution data

We made an attribution and traffic source dimension processing improvement. Depending on user consent status, if a GCLID is present and if UTM parameters are present, we have improved our logic that sets source and medium values. We now more frequently set source/medium dimensions to "google / cpc", and default channel groups to Paid Search where appropriate based on these signals.

June 20, 2024

GMP groups in scheduled emails

As a Google Analytics 360 administrator, you can now include Google Marketing Platform (GMP) groups in recipient lists when you send reports by email via the 'Schedule Email' and 'Send Email' share options.

Learn more about scheduled emails

June 18, 2024

Advertising segments in GA4

We've enhanced the Advertising section of Google Analytics 4 (GA4). You can now see the number of users who are eligible for remarketing and ads personalization in Google Ads; these are called advertising segments. The GA4 advertising segments are synonymous with audience segments in the Google Ads Audience Manager.

Learn more about advertising segments

June 12, 2024

Key event rate metrics in User acquisition and Traffic acquisition

We've updated the default User acquisition and Traffic acquisition reports to include the User key event rate and Session key event rate metrics. If you've included the reports in your report navigation, you will see these key event rate metrics in the reports automatically.

Learn more about the key event rate metrics

June 11, 2024

Custom event data import

Google Analytics 4 now supports custom event data import. With this feature, you can use a combination of standard fields and event-scoped custom dimensions to join and analyze imported event metadata with your existing Analytics data. You can then create custom reports for a more complete view of your Analytics data and imported event metadata.

Learn more about custom event data import

June 10, 2024

Updates to attribution models in GA4

We're updating our attribution models in GA4 over the next two weeks to improve the accuracy of conversion credit for paid search campaigns.

Currently, conversions that should be attributed to paid search are sometimes incorrectly attributed to organic search, most commonly for single-page applications. This happens when the 'gclid' parameter (identifying the paid search click) doesn't persist across page views.

With this update, we're adjusting how we attribute conversions to ensure campaign information is accurately captured on the first event of each page. If a user leaves your site and returns through a different channel, the attribution will update accordingly.

This change may increase the number of conversions attributed to paid search, potentially affecting your Ads campaign spending. We strongly recommend reviewing your budget caps and adjusting them as needed before this update takes effect.

June 4, 2024

Last 5 minutes in Realtime

The Realtime report in Google Analytics 4 now includes a more granular view of user activity, showing "Users in the last 5 minutes" with an enhanced bar graph so you can more clearly see how many users are on your site or app per minute.

Learn more about realtime

June 3, 2024

Floodlight linking for subproperties and roll-up properties

You can now link Floodlight with GA4 subproperties and rollup properties, just as you can with standard GA4 properties. By linking subproperties, marketing teams within your company can link and share specific data with a chosen Floodlight configuration. Rollup property linking supports cross-brand linking and activation use cases.

Learn more about Floodlight linking

Require config for automatically collected events

You must now have a config command or the Google tag installed on a web page for automatically collected events to be sent. This update prevents automatically collected events from being sent independently of the tag configuration, which previously caused (not set) attribution values to appear in reports.

May 31, 2024

Send reports by email instantly

As an administrator, you can now send standard and custom reports by email instantly, enabling team members to receive immediate analytics updates. The emailed report includes data for the specified date range with any filters or comparisons applied to the report when the email is sent.

Learn more about sending reports by email

This image shows the option for sending reports by email.

May 28, 2024

Switch between days, weeks, and months in reports

You can now view your line chart data by day, week, or month, depending on the level of detail you need.

Learn more about switching between day, week, and month

May 22, 2024

Improvements to attribution channel assignments

We've improved how we process attribution data to ensure more accurate channel group assignments for key events. With this change, you'll now see fewer events incorrectly attributed to the Direct channel grouping and get more accurate channel grouping assignments.

May 20, 2024

Export to Google Sheets

You can now export data from a report to Google Sheets, allowing you to use Google Sheets' features to further analyze your data. To export the data in a report, click Share this report () in the top right of a report, then click Download File > Export to Google Sheets.

Learn more about exporting reports

May 14, 2024

Assign users and groups to report collections for Analytics 360

As an administrator of an Analytics 360 property, you can now assign users or groups to report collections, enabling you to customize your report collections to different user bases. For example, you can surface marketing-focused reports to the marketing team, product-focused reports to the product team, and high-level executive summaries to the CEO.

Learn how to assign users or groups to report collections

May 7, 2024

Saved comparisons

As an administrator or editor of a Google Analytics property, you can now save comparisons to your Google Analytics 4 property. Saved comparisons enable you and others with access to your property to compare the user bases you care about without needing to recreate the comparisons each time you want to analyze those user bases.

You can also now define audience-based conditions through saved comparisons, enabling you to report on your most advanced user segmentations. For example, you can define a comparison as audience name = "high value users."

We've included prebuilt saved comparisons for commonly used comparisons to help you get started.

Learn more about saved comparisons

April 23, 2024

User data import for Google Analytics 4 audiences

We've improved the way user data import works with Google Analytics 4 audiences. Now, data imported via user data import, joined using either user Id or client Id, is immediately available as criteria to qualify a user for an existing GA4 audience without requiring further activity from the user. That means users imported into Analytics who meet criteria for an existing GA4 audience are immediately added to it.

For example, imagine you have created a "Gold" loyalty tier audience based on a user-scoped custom dimension that specifies a user’s loyalty tier. Now, when you upload the loyalty tiers via user data import, imported "Gold" tier users are immediately added to the GA4 audience. You don’t need to wait for them to become active on the website or app to qualify.

Include users when: loyalty_tier contains gold at any point in time

Learn more about user data import

April 9, 2024

Salesforce Data Import

We've added Salesforce as a data source for Data import. You can now import data directly from Salesforce to Google Analytics as offline-event data. You’ll be able to schedule daily or hourly imports, and select any existing Salesforce milestones and attributes you want to import. Salesforce milestones will be collected as GA4 events, and you can optionally import any existing Salesforce attributes as GA4 dimensions.

Learn how to implement Salesforce Data Import

April 3, 2024

Display & Video 360 (DV360) linking recommendation

When we identify an unlinked Display & Video 360 advertiser, you may now see a recommendation to link your DV360 advertiser to Google Analytics. By linking the DV360 advertiser, you can export Analytics audiences and conversions to DV360, and see campaign cost data and user engagement data in Analytics for better campaign measurement.

Learn more about recommendations

March 27, 2024

Conversions and key events

Recently, we announced that we're simplifying Google Analytics reporting by updating the Advertising section, bringing all relevant reporting for advertisers and publishers together in one place.

Along with this update, we're aligning how conversions are defined across Google Ads and Analytics to create a simpler and more intuitive experience in the way conversions are measured and reported across the two platforms.

Previously, important events that were marked as conversions in Analytics were measured differently from how Google Ads conversions are measured, leading to discrepancies across platforms.

From now on, events that measure actions that are important to the success of your business are now called 'key events.' You can use the behavioral data from your key events to improve the user experience across your websites and apps.

A 'conversion' now refers to an important action that you want to use to measure the performance of your ad campaigns and optimize your bidding strategy. With an aligned definition of 'conversion' across Google Ads and Analytics, you can now, for the first time, view consistent conversion-based performance metrics in both Google Ads and Analytics reports.

Learn more about conversion vs key events

Key Events and Conversions in Google Analytics: What's new

March 20, 2024

Collect user-provided data without a user ID

With this update, you're no longer required to send a user ID before you collect user-provided data from your website or app. If you collect user-provided data without sending a user ID, we'll now leverage the user-provided data you send to construct a hashed and pseudonymized user ID to provide better cross-platform user reporting and support conversion measurement and audience sharing.

Additionally, you can now request the deletion of user-provided data using user-provided data in addition to standard identifiers like user ID, client ID, and app instance ID.

Learn more about user-provided data collection.

March 8, 2024

Google Marketing Platform Admin API

We're introducing the first version of a new API for Google Marketing Platform users, enabling organizational administrators to:

Upgrade or downgrade properties between standard and Analytics 360
Link Google Analytics accounts to organizations

With this update, organization details are now included in the accounts list in the Admin API, connecting the existing Admin API to the new Google Marketing Platform Admin API.

Learn more about the Google Marketing Platform Admin API.

March 6, 2024

Universal Analytics 360 product changes

As previously communicated, starting March 2024, Universal Analytics 360 advertising features (remarketing, conversion export, bidding optimization) will no longer be supported for traffic from the European Economic Area (EEA). Additionally, certain features such as realtime reporting and API, and realtime BigQuery export will no longer be supported on Universal Analytics 360 for all traffic.

Learn more about the deprecated Universal Analytics 360 features.

February 28, 2024

Primary Channel Group

We have added the Primary Channel Group, a new, editable channel group that will be the default reporting channel for all channel reports. Channels are rule-based definitions of your website's traffic sources that let you monitor the performance of all of the channels sending traffic to your website. The Primary Channel Group allows you to control your default reporting channel, creating a record of custom channel changes over time for historical reporting purposes, while still maintaining all custom channel groups which reflect the most current definition across all historical data.

The initial criteria for the Primary Channel Group is the same as the Default Channel Group, and so all your historical data in the Primary Channel Group will match that of the Default Channel group until you change the criteria for the Primary Channel Group. You will be able to then set the Primary Channel Group criteria to any of your existing Custom Channel Group configurations, at any time, and from that point forward the Primary Channel Group’s data will respect the criteria of that Custom Channel Group.

You will continue to have access to the default, and all custom channel groups via the primary dimension picker, custom reporting, and explorations.

Learn more about how to configure your Primary Channel Group.

February 22, 2024

Advertising section updates

To simplify reporting in Google Analytics, we’re updating the Advertising section, bringing all relevant reporting for advertisers and publishers together in one place. With this update, you can now use the following sections for either behavioral or performance reporting:

The Reports section provides insights into how users engage with your websites and apps so you can improve your product and user experience
The Advertising section will become the hub to monitor and analyze your campaigns whether you’re a publisher or an advertiser.

Additionally, the Explore section, Custom Reports, and the Data API will provide behavioral insights as well as anonymized and aggregated insights from ads campaigns.

The following changes will start rolling out today:

Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and publisher reports and features will be located in the Advertising section.
Access to the Advertising section will require a link to at least one Google Ads, AdSense, AdMob, Google Ad Manager or Google Marketing Platform account.
The Publisher ads report will move to the Advertising section

With these updates, you will be able to access more tailored experiences across behavioral insights and advertising or publisher insights. If you currently run ads campaigns or monetize your properties with ads, make sure your ads accounts are linked to continue getting these actionable insights. If no account is linked, you will see a page that prompts you to link to an ads or publisher account.

Learn more about the Advertising section.

February 13, 2024

Trend change detection

Trend change detection is a new type of insight that surfaces subtle but long-lasting and important changes in the direction of your data. It's similar to anomaly detection in that they both detect a change in data. The main difference is that anomaly detection highlights sudden spikes or dips in data, while trend change detection highlights more subtle changes over a longer period of time.

Google Analytics displays these changes in an Insight card in the Insights & recommendations section of the Home page, in Reports snapshot and Advertising snapshot, and in the Insights hub.

Learn more about trend detection

February 9, 2024

Event parameter limit increase

For Google Analytics 360 properties, we've increased the limit on the length of event parameter values collected through the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK for mobile apps from 100 characters to 500 characters.

Learn more about Google Analytics 360 data collection limits

February 8, 2024

Manual traffic source dimensions and report

We've added user-scoped, session-scoped, and event-scoped variations of 8 new platform-agnostic traffic source dimensions. These new dimensions apply consistently across paid and organic traffic and across Google media and third-party media, enhancing your ability to analyze user behavior and performance in cross-channel reporting, explorations, segments, and audiences.

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

These new dimensions are populated based on the UTM parameter values passed in click URLs for websites and the following new UTM values passed in the campaign_details event for mobile apps:

FirebaseAnalytics.Param.CAMPAIGN_ID
FirebaseAnalytics.Param.SOURCE_PLATFORM

The session-scoped dimensions are also available in a new Manual report, which you can access by clicking View Manual campaigns in the Acquisition overview report in the Life cycle collection. Learn more about the manual report

February 7, 2024

Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360 linking for subproperties and roll-up properties

We’ve added the ability to link your subproperties and roll-up properties with Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360. Linking functions exactly as it does for ordinary properties. Once linked, Google Analytics will send the same data in the same way as for ordinary properties.

With this capability clients 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 for advertising to subsets or supersets of your audience.

Learn how to link Google Analytics with Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360.

January 31, 2024

Play Console recommendation

When we've identified an unlinked Google Play app associated with your Google Analytics property, you may now see a recommendation to link your Play Console account to Google Analytics. By linking your Play Console account, you get access to in-app purchase and subscription metrics in your Google Analytics 4 reports.

Learn more about recommendations

January 30, 2024

In-product help

We've added new help options to Google Analytics 4, designed to enhance your experience and provide instant support. These new options are accessible through the help button in the top-right corner of Google Analytics.

Learn about this page: Get detailed guidance on using the features on your current page in Google Analytics.
Start tour: Open a guided tour, where available, that walks through key procedures relevant to the current page.
Get more help: Find information in the Google Analytics Help Center or join the Google Analytics Help Community for further assistance.
Send feedback: Encounter an issue? Share your feedback with the Google Analytics team.

Learn more about in-product help

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?