After working the world of attribution into a frenzy with the GA4 news, Google continues to introduce new features ahead of the looming transition.
For digital marketers and analysts, the initial episode of disappointment triggered by the demise of UA has converted into bouts of curiosity and excitement with regular system updates. Some of the already released features have them convinced that the switch wasn’t that bad.
In the last months, a few more advancements of the sort have been disclosed. Let’s discover what they are and what marketers can expect from them.
5 Recent GA4 Updates You Should Know About
- Additional Domains for EU-based Traffic Data
On June 13, 2022, Google announced the integration of new domains to ensure marketers can collect EU-related user data through EU-based servers only. This condition will apply regardless of the property’s location.
This step promotes security for EU users and ensures compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Marketers who get EU traffic and currently rely on a content security policy (CSP) must update their configurations to allow the integration of the following Analytics domains into IMG-src and connection-src directives for all sites with GA4.
- region1.google-analytics.com
- region1.analytics.google.com
Keep in mind that without these updates, you won’t be able to collect EU-based traffic for your website and app. If not this, you must include *.google-analytics.com and *.analytics.google.com to handle upcoming domain updates.
Although it seems like a minor change, it’s a relief for marketers concerned about GA compliance issues. The processing of the data coming from the EU will no longer happen in the US. This means less worry about legality issues of using GA4 in the EU.
- Recently Viewed Section Updates
Another minor but helpful change GA4 has introduced for marketers is expanding the list of recently viewed items in search results.
With GA4, digital marketers can stay on top of their attribution efforts through quick and seamless navigation to custom reports, Admin page, Configuration settings, Explore tab, and the Advertising section. This doesn’t just ensure a seamless tracking experience but also adds to their convenience and helps save precious time.
Before this update, you could only get links to the recently accessed standard reports.
- Supported Web Data Reporting
On July 8, 2022, Google announced GA4 web data reporting support through publisher network links in Google Ad Manager.
While the Google Ad Manager Integration itself is a huge benefit for publishers because it allows access to web and app data in Ad Manager reports, web data support takes unified reporting and analysis up a notch.
As a publisher, you can expect seamless reporting of the web and app ad monetization data from the Ad Manager in GA4. Likewise, GA4 behavioral data from your website and app can be reported in Ad Manager reports.
Ultimately, you can perform a more effective cross-platform analysis than what UA allowed for better insights into how users engage with your website and app.
- A Bunch of New Dimensions and Metrics
In the second week of July, Google announced new dimensions in GA4 updates that enable you to see three critical metrics across segments, reports, explorations, audiences, and data API.
- Bounce Rate
With GA4, you’ll be able to view the bounce rate in Explorations and Reporting Customization – and it’s not the same as what you’re used to seeing with UA.
For GA4, the bounce rate is the opposite of the engagement rate. In other words, it’s the percentage of unengaged sessions. So, if a user lands on your website and stays on it for a few seconds before leaving, GA4 will consider it a bounce. On the flip side, an engaged session would be where the user stayed for more than 10 seconds, interacted with the site, or viewed at least two pages.
In UA, a session with no user interaction is considered a bounce. So, it’s a bounce if a user leaves your site without clicking on links or engaging in other interactions, despite staying on a web page for several minutes.
The improvement of bounce rate as a metric in GA4 will allow marketers to measure users’ engagement levels more meaningfully.
- Conversion Rate
GA4 also empowers digital marketers and analysts to report on the conversion rate of an event with more accuracy than UA allowed.
You’ll be able to keep track of the following in GA4.
- User conversion rate (user percentage that triggered a conversion event)
- Session conversion rate (session percentage in which the conversion happened)
With these insights, you’ll be well on your way to making informed and profitable marketing decisions focused on customized targeting of prospects.
- UTM Term and Ad Content
These new GA4 dimensions will allow you to see the utm_content value in first user manual ad content as well as session manual ad content. This means you can easily differentiate creative values and tell which ones are more effective.
You can also see the utm_term value assigned to the first user and session manual terms for more efficient keyword analysis.
Before this update, marketers had to find utm_content and utm_term manually in the Reports tab under the Acquisition section, which took more time. Now, these metrics will be right at their fingertips!
- Report Filters
This is among the most beneficial GA4 updates until now.
Google has enabled publishers with property access to perform more efficient report analyses using filters. The types of reports this feature works on include:
- Detail reports
- Real-time reports
- Custom detail reports
- Overview reports’ summary cards
For example, you can apply a filter to highlight a subsection of the report or even filter out the data received from Android or iOS apps. You could also hide website traffic data in the report using the respective filter.
The filter will be removed as soon as you exit the report. This will eliminate confusion for the next publisher who may want to review the report.
What’s more?
Editors and individuals in higher roles can save a filter on a report for a more guided experience for the team. There will be an option to create a separate copy for the filtered version.
Stay Updated on GA4 Updates With Napkyn!
We’ll continue to hear new GA4 updates until July 1, 2023, when UA finally goes away.
Get in touch with our experts to discuss in detail what these GA4 updates mean for your analyzing and digital marketing efforts.
Want to discuss in detail what these GA4 updates mean for your analyzing and digital marketing efforts?
