Adam Brzostek
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Analytics news: April 2025
April was another month of mostly cosmetic changes in Google Analytics 4
AI insights in a new place
Google clearly wants to push its AI engine that generates recommendations and insights, so it's making it more prominent: besides the Home page, it will now also appear in standard reports.
I suspect this is mainly about collecting feedback, because in my opinion the algorithm is currently completely useless. After my initial curiosity wore off, I stopped checking what it generates altogether, since right now it has no real business value.
New filter match types for item-scoped dimensions
I find it hard to understand what stopped Google's engineers from adding this seemingly basic option earlier, but we finally have more item-level filtering options in Explorations. It's a much-needed addition, although a feature this fundamental should have existed long ago.
All match types are now available, not just exact match as before.
New report templates
Filed under completely useless: GA4 has new templates for creating overview reports.
Google Tag Manager
There was only one GTM update in April
New tag diagnostics alerts and dismissible recommendations
The tag diagnostics tool has new alerts and recommendations. Two of them are worth mentioning.
- Missing gtag config command: this diagnostic message appears when Google detects that the Google tag code is set up incorrectly, which may prevent automatic event measurement in the property.
- Missing Google tags: this diagnostic message appears when event tags in Google Tag Manager have no corresponding Google tags. This one is really helpful, because GTM practically sets up the missing tags for you, and all you have to do is publish
The option I was happiest about is the ability to dismiss recommendations and alerts, but unfortunately it isn't available for every message. The idea behind the diagnostics tool is sound, but like most things Google has released lately, it works, to put it mildly, less than optimally, and often causes more confusion, misunderstanding and frustration than real help.