Adam Brzostek
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Analytics news: September 2023
You can finally use audiences created in Google Analytics 4 in Google Ad Manager. Until now this was only available for Universal Analytics, which seriously limited the marketing options of everyone using GAM. Your audiences should appear in GAM automatically, as long as your GAM account is linked to the GA4 property and Google signals is turned on in that property.
GA4, BigQuery | New user data export from Google Analytics 4
The existing GA4 → BigQuery link now has an additional export type for user data.
When you turn on this option, an additional table is created in BigQuery. Each row in it represents a unique user and holds fields scoped to that user, such as:
- active audiences
- LTV
- purchase and churn probability
- parameters from user_properties
- devices
- geography
GA4, BigQuery | Session-level traffic sources in the Google Analytics 4 export to Google BigQuery
Until now, getting session-level traffic source information out of the raw data took quite a bit of effort and meant working with event parameters.
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SELECT
CONCAT(user_pseudo_id, (select value.int_value from unnest(event_params) where key = 'ga_session_id’)) as session_id,
max((select value.string_value from unnest(event_params) where key = 'campaign’)) as campaign,
max((select value.string_value from unnest(event_params) where key = 'source’)) as source,
max((select value.string_value from unnest(event_params) where key = 'medium’)) as medium
from `table`
group by 1The table only had user acquisition dimensions, and even those in a cut-down form: source, medium and campaign were all you could use.
Session-level parameters are now also available in dedicated fields, which makes working with the data much easier.
GTM | The Google tag replaces the Google Analytics 4 Configuration tag
First of all, this change doesn't require any action on your part. It happens automatically, and Google Analytics measurement will keep working as before.
What is the Google tag?
It's a single Google tag that lets you manage multiple products from one tag. Since September, the Google tag has been fully compatible with GTM, with Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads as destinations.
You'll find more about the Google tag in our article on the topic: https://bettersteps.pl/en/blog/google-tag-replaces-ga4-configuration-tag