Analytics news: July 2023

GA4 | Business objectives collection

For a while now, there's been a change in the setup wizard for new Google Analytics 4 properties. Besides making the industry category and business size mandatory, it now also requires you to choose a business objective for your property. You can pick several from the list below:

Apart from being used for statistics, this information determines which standard reports appear in the default view. You can of course change them later.

GA4 | New dimensions in GA4 audiences

Google Analytics 4 has added 5 new dimensions to the audience builder:

• Country
• Manual term (UTM term)
• Mobile device info
• Minute
• New / returning

and a new metric:

• Session duration

GA4 | Audience Export API

With the Google Analytics Data API v1, you can now export the user and device IDs in an audience created in Google Analytics 4. Previously, this information was only available through a direct link to tools such as Google Ads. There isn't much more information out there yet, and the developer page has limited access, but it looks like the start of a big shift that will eventually let you share or sell remarketing lists without integrating with Google Ads.

GA4 | Ecommerce dimensions and metrics finally available in custom reports

Until now, if you wanted to analyze ecommerce data in more detail, you had to use Explorations or raw data in BigQuery. Now you can build your own custom report with ecommerce metrics and dimensions and add it to a collection in your GA4 report Library

Google Tag Manager | New Transformations feature in server-side tagging

This is a very interesting feature that lets you modify the data received by a server-side container before it's sent on to its destination. It gives you precise control over which data gets processed further, by:

• removing sensitive and confidential data to improve security
• removing unnecessary data to reduce processing volume
• modifying the values of individual parameters
• enriching incoming events with additional parameters

When you configure a transformation, after choosing its type you select the parameters it applies to and, depending on the transformation type, define the new values.

You can also set rules for when the transformation should apply and to which tags.