Analytics news: March 2025

Google Analytics 4

The GA4 changes in March were mostly cosmetic, and only one of them is worth mentioning.

You can now add annotations

We know this feature very well from Universal Analytics (again). It lets you add helpful comments that all users of the property can see. It's a really useful way to note what happened in a given period, for example to explain traffic anomalies.

To add annotations, you need Editor access to the property.

Note that there's a limit of 1,000 annotations per property.

To add an annotation, right-click the chart and select Add annotation

This opens an editor where you can easily create your comment. You can also give it a label color.

You'll also see annotations straight from the Google team about major changes in how tracking works.

Google Tag Manager

GTM finally got some updates too, but as with GA, only one deserves a closer look

GTM will load the Google tag automatically if it detects Google Ads or Floodlight tags on the site

This feature is set to take effect on April 10, and anyone with access to at least one Google Ads or Campaign Manager account has probably already received an email about it.

Unfortunately, not much is known yet about how it will work.

The idea is that it will load the Google tag before any events are sent.

This is supposed to improve data collection.

Unfortunately, there's no information anywhere about exactly when the tag will load: right before the event itself, or at some point during container initialization.

It's also unclear how to handle the required consents in this case, especially since many companies use basic consent mode because of legal concerns.

For now there are more questions than answers, but I'm keeping an eye on it and will definitely let you know how it turns out