Analytics news: May 2023

GA4 | New features for building segments and audiences

The GA4 segment builder has a new feature that lets you create a segment of users who performed a given action within a specific time period. This can be very useful for recurring campaigns. For example, you can create a segment of users who made a purchase during Black Friday and retarget them during the next sale.

GA4 | Non-engaged sessions

A new metric that tells you about sessions without user engagement. You can use it, for example, to exclude those users from your remarketing campaigns. Other changes:

• the list of metrics and dimensions available in the segment builder has been expanded
• there are more operators for event count
• you can now build segments based on a parameter value alone, without selecting a specific event

GA4 | Custom funnel reports

GA4 now lets you create a custom report in the form of a funnel. It's simply a funnel exploration turned into a report, and in fact you have to start by creating a funnel exploration. You can then save it as a report and publish it in your navigation menu. Step-by-step instructions are available here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/13012015. The Purchase journey report has also been improved recently

Looker Studio - Pausing report updates

You can now pause updates in your report. While paused, changes to settings or filters won't refresh the data, which reduces the number of queries and helps you stay within your quota while you build the report. Changes are applied to the data only after you resume updates. This feature works only in edit mode.