Analytics news: April 2023

GA4 | Conversions finally work more like goals in Google Analytics

Until now, GA4 only offered the default way of counting conversions: every time the event fired, it counted. For some conversion types this wasn't ideal, especially for events that usually happen several times per session when all we care about is whether the user did it or not, e.g. adding a product to the cart. From now on, there are two conversion counting methods:

• Once per event: the existing GA4 method, counts a conversion every time the event occurs
• Once per session: counts the event as a conversion only the first time it occurs in a given session

You can easily change the counting method in the conversion settings. Click the three dots next to the event to open the menu:

GA4 | Fewer attribution models available

Google Analytics is removing the following models:

• first click
• linear
• position based
• time decay

These models won't be available in new properties created from May 2023, and they'll disappear from existing properties in August 2023.

GA4 | You can now modify and create events with regular expressions in the GA4 interface

This change comes rather late, but it means we can migrate our UA event and destination goals that use regular expressions. Better late than never, although many people have probably found a workaround by now.

GTM | Pausing tags in server-side containers

Google keeps developing server-side containers by adding more features known from client-side containers. You can now pause tags in server-side containers too.