Top 5 New Features of Google Analytics for 2024

The Google Analytics product team is constantly testing new features, and here’s my pick of the most useful five to launch in 2024.

Tip: Google has a changelog listing all the new features since January 2024.

Adding back ecommerce reports

The biggest complaint about GA4 in 2023 was that it missed many of the pre-canned reports that ecommerce brands were used to in Universal Analytics.

But in 2024 we got back the transactions/purchases report, the checkout journey report, and the order coupons report.

Pick the primary channel group

Before this change, you had a fixed default channel grouping. You could create additional custom channel groups – BUT you had to remember to apply those custom groups to every report.

Now you can pick whether the primary channel group is default or custom, so your channel preferences are saved and consistent across the whole property.

Plot rows button

Want to see how different rows in the table are trending? Use the Plot Rows button in the top left of the table to break down the chart above by row.

Attribution quality improvements

When events are attributed to the dreaded ‘Direct’ channel it’s hard to figure out if there’s a setup issue.

In a few cases, Google found bugs in the data processing, and it’s fixing those holes.

e.g. conversions that should have been attributed to paid search were sometimes incorrectly attributed to organic search when the ‘gclid’ parameter (identifying the paid search click) didn’t persist across page views.

e.g. preventing automatically collected events (like scrolls and clicks) from being sent independently of the tag configuration, which previously caused (not set) attribution.

They’ve also made it much easier to report on the source of the session via BigQuery, by making the session source and UTMs sticky parameters across all events.

Email to your colleagues

You could previously set up scheduled emails, but sometimes you want to send a new analysis to a colleague instantly.

Now you can do that in one click.