A vast number of businesses worldwide use Google Analytics. Regardless if they are big or small, getting insights about their customer preferences is crucial in providing the best user experience.
The rapid scale at which businesses are moving online due to the current pandemic has not gone unnoticed by Google’s experts. As a result, there have been 16 updates to Google Analytics from March this year.
If you are running an online business, keeping track of these updates can be crucial to your SEO management and overall online business success. Let’s discuss the ones that require particular attention.
Behaviour Dashboard features new Performance cards
One of the features of new card additions is to help Google Analytics users track where exactly traffic is coming to their site. What is more, it will help you answer the perpetual dilemma of whether the content on a particular page needs to be improved.
This new Analytics will be incredibly helpful to all those who use different paid media channels. New performance cards provide additional insights on how various paid channels perform against each other and help identify the best and worst campaigns and audiences.
Automatic bot traffic exclusion
Before this update, users had to enable bot exclusion for every property individually. Traffic coming from spiders and bots is automatically excluded from now on, resulting in filtered and more relevant traffic data.
To identify bot and spider traffic, Google research is combined with the International Spiders and Bots List maintained by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Bot traffic exclusion cannot be disabled, and it does not provide data on how much bot traffic was excluded.
Two new features in the Analysis Cohort technique
When performing analysis to discover unique insights, you can now select any individual event as a return criterion or inclusion.
For example, you can see how new cohorts convert on your business’ most relevant events. Or, you can compare the new cohorts’ completion rate levels of free and paid users, as well as any other behavior along important customer journeys.
Change History has a new format
Change History features a new format since the start of September 2020. It now supports both Account and Property admins, as well as before-and-after states and structured data.
With the new format, the changes structure is recorded in a standardized Who, What, Where, & When manner. The experts at Google Analytics are firm that the updated Change History will help improve security, support, and audit experience.
Two new predictive metrics to App + Web properties
The first one is the Purchase Probability. It predicts the chances for the users who have visited your site or app will purchase in the following seven days. The second one is Churn Probability, which indicates the likelihood that the users that have been recently active are not going to visit your site or app in the next seven days.
Google Analytics will use data acquired using these two metrics to propose new predictive audiences, which you can easily create in Audience Builder. Addressing such audience groups can help you drive business growth, either by motivating the probable visitors or retaining those about to churn.
Chrome Referrer changes
Chrome browser-version fields and referrer undergone privacy changes. Although undoubtedly positive, these changes substantially impact Google Analytics’ treatment of organic referrals from Chrome.
From now on, Google Analytics will identify organic traffic relying on the list of established search engines. The list is comprehensive, and there may be no need to make any adjustments. However, if you notice you are missing organic referral data, make sure you reorder the list or make additions to it. By doing so, you can modify how organic search traffic is added to your account and appear in your reports.
App + Web Properties now feature event-scoped custom dimensions and metrics
Previously, a similar functionality demanded individual registration for every event. Plus, it was a part of custom parameter reporting, which both required intensive effort and quota.
The recent Google Analytics App + Web properties update allows custom dimensions and metrics to be registered at the property level. The aim is to simplify labor and substantially preserve quota.
New analytics aims to save historical event-scoped aggregates by increasing the scope of the existing custom dimensions and metrics to the Property level. At the same time, new aggregates should seamlessly extend historical ones.
Cross-domain measurement in web data streams
Google Analytics now supports cross-domain measurement in web data streams. This feature brings positive changes to reporting inside the same data stream.
The result would be improved report accuracy of the important customer journeys that happen across different domains. One example of an application would be the cases where the eCommerce domain is different from the main site’s domain.
Also, the setup is quick and easy. Any user that has a permission to edit at the property level can set it up directly from the interface.
New data filters
One of the issues with data filtering that many Google Analytics users complained about was that analytics data was sent to the property when developers and internal users navigated the site or an app. New data filters provide a way to prevent this from happening.
With the introduction of Internal Traffic Filters and Developer Traffic Filters, you can ensure that internal and developer navigation does not permanently affect the analytics reports.
RSLA with Analytics
You can use new Analytics to create remarketing audiences, which provides additional sophistication for the link building. For this to work, there are a couple of obligatory steps.
First, you must enable Google Signals. Second, Google Analytics needs to be linked to Google Ads. Third, make sure the Ads personalization setting is enabled on the link. Finally, you have to have at least 1000 cookies on your RSLA to use it to customize your search ads.
The new Analytics is a fast-evolving tool. For sure, with the continual rise of online business volume, Analytics will continue to develop the best possible ways of giving you customer-centric measurements since user experience matters the most when advertising is concerned. All you need to do is keep improving your online business reach and customer conversion is to stay on top of the latest Analytics updates and make the best use of what they bring to the table.
