What's new in Google Analytics

This article provides information on the latest releases in Google Analytics for this year. For information on releases from past years, see the What's New archive.

Releases

April 9, 2024
April 3, 2024
March 27, 2024
March 20, 2024
March 8, 2024
March 6, 2024
February 28, 2024
February 22, 2024
February 13, 2024
February 9, 2024
February 8, 2024
February 7, 2024
January 31, 2024
January 30, 2024

April 9, 2024

Salesforce Data Import

We've added Salesforce as a data source for Data import. You can now import data directly from Salesforce to Google Analytics as offline-event data. You’ll be able to schedule daily or hourly imports, and select any existing Salesforce milestones and attributes you want to import. Salesforce milestones will be collected as GA4 events, and you can optionally import any existing Salesforce attributes as GA4 dimensions.

Learn how to implement Salesforce Data Import

April 3, 2024

Display & Video 360 (DV360) linking recommendation

When we identify an unlinked Display & Video 360 advertiser, you may now see a recommendation to link your DV360 advertiser to Google Analytics. By linking the DV360 advertiser, you can export Analytics audiences and conversions to DV360, and see campaign cost data and user engagement data in Analytics for better campaign measurement.

Learn more about recommendations

March 27, 2024

Conversions and key events

Recently, we announced that we're simplifying Google Analytics reporting by updating the Advertising section, bringing all relevant reporting for advertisers and publishers together in one place.

Along with this update, we're aligning how conversions are defined across Google Ads and Analytics to create a simpler and more intuitive experience in the way conversions are measured and reported across the two platforms.

Previously, important events that were marked as conversions in Analytics were measured differently from how Google Ads conversions are measured, leading to discrepancies across platforms.

From now on, events that measure actions that are important to the success of your business are now called 'key events.' You can use the behavioral data from your key events to improve the user experience across your websites and apps.

A 'conversion' now refers to an important action that you want to use to measure the performance of your ad campaigns and optimize your bidding strategy. With an aligned definition of 'conversion' across Google Ads and Analytics, you can now, for the first time, view consistent conversion-based performance metrics in both Google Ads and Analytics reports.

Learn more about conversion vs key events

Key Events and Conversions in Google Analytics: What's new

March 20, 2024

Collect user-provided data without a user ID

With this update, you're no longer required to send a user ID before you collect user-provided data from your website or app. If you collect user-provided data without sending a user ID, we'll now leverage the user-provided data you send to construct a hashed and pseudonymized user ID to provide better cross-platform user reporting and support conversion measurement and audience sharing.

Additionally, you can now request the deletion of user-provided data using user-provided data in addition to standard identifiers like user ID, client ID, and app instance ID.

Learn more about user-provided data collection.

March 8, 2024

Google Marketing Platform Admin API

We're introducing the first version of a new API for Google Marketing Platform users, enabling organizational administrators to:

Upgrade or downgrade properties between standard and Analytics 360
Link Google Analytics accounts to organizations

With this update, organization details are now included in the accounts list in the Admin API, connecting the existing Admin API to the new Google Marketing Platform Admin API.

Learn more about the Google Marketing Platform Admin API.

March 6, 2024

Universal Analytics 360 product changes

As previously communicated, starting March 2024, Universal Analytics 360 advertising features (remarketing, conversion export, bidding optimization) will no longer be supported for traffic from the European Economic Area (EEA). Additionally, certain features such as realtime reporting and API, and realtime BigQuery export will no longer be supported on Universal Analytics 360 for all traffic.

Learn more about the deprecated Universal Analytics 360 features.

February 28, 2024

Primary Channel Group

We have added the Primary Channel Group, a new, editable channel group that will be the default reporting channel for all channel reports. Channels are rule-based definitions of your website's traffic sources that let you monitor the performance of all of the channels sending traffic to your website. The Primary Channel Group allows you to control your default reporting channel, creating a record of custom channel changes over time for historical reporting purposes, while still maintaining all custom channel groups which reflect the most current definition across all historical data.

The initial criteria for the Primary Channel Group is the same as the Default Channel Group, and so all your historical data in the Primary Channel Group will match that of the Default Channel group until you change the criteria for the Primary Channel Group. You will be able to then set the Primary Channel Group criteria to any of your existing Custom Channel Group configurations, at any time, and from that point forward the Primary Channel Group’s data will respect the criteria of that Custom Channel Group.

You will continue to have access to the default, and all custom channel groups via the primary dimension picker, custom reporting, and explorations.

Learn more about how to configure your Primary Channel Group.

February 22, 2024

Advertising section updates

To simplify reporting in Google Analytics, we’re updating the Advertising section, bringing all relevant reporting for advertisers and publishers together in one place. With this update, you can now use the following sections for either behavioral or performance reporting:

The Reports section provides insights into how users engage with your websites and apps so you can improve your product and user experience
The Advertising section will become the hub to monitor and analyze your campaigns whether you’re a publisher or an advertiser.

Additionally, the Explore section, Custom Reports, and the Data API will provide behavioral insights as well as anonymized and aggregated insights from ads campaigns.

The following changes will start rolling out today:

Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and publisher reports and features will be located in the Advertising section.
Access to the Advertising section will require a link to at least one Google Ads, AdSense, AdMob, Google Ad Manager or Google Marketing Platform account.
The Publisher ads report will move to the Advertising section

With these updates, you will be able to access more tailored experiences across behavioral insights and advertising or publisher insights. If you currently run ads campaigns or monetize your properties with ads, make sure your ads accounts are linked to continue getting these actionable insights. If no account is linked, you will see a page that prompts you to link to an ads or publisher account.

Learn more about the Advertising section.

February 13, 2024

Trend change detection

Trend change detection is a new type of insight that surfaces subtle but long-lasting and important changes in the direction of your data. It's similar to anomaly detection in that they both detect a change in data. The main difference is that anomaly detection highlights sudden spikes or dips in data, while trend change detection highlights more subtle changes over a longer period of time.

Google Analytics displays these changes in an Insight card in the Insights & recommendations section of the Home page, in Reports snapshot and Advertising snapshot, and in the Insights hub.

Learn more about trend detection

February 9, 2024

Event parameter limit increase

For Google Analytics 360 properties, we've increased the limit on the length of event parameter values collected through the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK for mobile apps from 100 characters to 500 characters.

Learn more about Google Analytics 360 data collection limits

February 8, 2024

Manual traffic source dimensions and report

We've added user-scoped, session-scoped, and event-scoped variations of 8 new platform-agnostic traffic source dimensions. These new dimensions apply consistently across paid and organic traffic and across Google media and third-party media, enhancing your ability to analyze user behavior and performance in cross-channel reporting, explorations, segments, and audiences.

Manual source
Manual medium
Manual source / medium
Manual campaign name
Manual campaign ID
Manual term
Manual content
Manual source platform

These new dimensions are populated based on the UTM parameter values passed in click URLs for websites and the following new UTM values passed in the campaign_details event for mobile apps:

FirebaseAnalytics.Param.CAMPAIGN_ID
FirebaseAnalytics.Param.SOURCE_PLATFORM

The session-scoped dimensions are also available in a new Manual report, which you can access by clicking View Manual campaigns in the Acquisition overview report in the Life cycle collection. Learn more about the manual report

February 7, 2024

Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360 linking for subproperties and roll-up properties

We’ve added the ability to link your subproperties and roll-up properties with Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360. Linking functions exactly as it does for ordinary properties. Once linked, Google Analytics will send the same data in the same way as for ordinary properties.

With this capability clients can now share a subset of data from a subproperty, or a superset of cross-property data from roll-up, with Search Ads 360 or Display & Video 360 for advertising to subsets or supersets of your audience.

Learn how to link Google Analytics with Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360.

January 31, 2024

Play Console recommendation

When we've identified an unlinked Google Play app associated with your Google Analytics property, you may now see a recommendation to link your Play Console account to Google Analytics. By linking your Play Console account, you get access to in-app purchase and subscription metrics in your Google Analytics 4 reports.