Latest Updates on Google Data Analytics (August 2021)
Tags: Google Analytics, Bigquery, Google Data Studio, Google Tag Manager, Release Notes

Latest Updates on Google Data Analytics (August 2021)

The highlights of the updates on BigQuery, Data Studio, Google Analytics (GA) & Google Tag Manager (GTM). By Alexander Junke datadice Follow Sep 8 · 5 min read

Photo by Dirk Pohlers on Unsplash

In this blog post, I want to summarize the new releases from the Google tools, that we use daily in datadice. Therefore I want to give an overview of the new features of BigQuery, Data Studio, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Furthermore, I will focus on the releases that I consider to be the most important ones and I will also name some other changes that were made.

If you want to take a closer look, here you can find the Release Notes from BigQuery, Data Studio, Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager.

BigQuery

There are some new features to discover in BigQuery:

New table creation statements

CREATE TABLE LIKE and CREATE TABLE COPY are two new DDL statements in BigQuery.

CREATE TABLE LIKE: creating a new table with the same metadata and data from the original table

CREATE TABLE COPY: creating a new table with the same metadata

Let us take a quick look at both examples:

The like statement just creates the table “like_table_name” with the structure of the table “origin_table_name”. The new table is empty then.

The copy statement just creates the table “copy_table_name” with the structure and data of the table “origin_table_name”. The new table has the same content as the original one.

Change the data type of an existing column

There is another new DDL functionality. With the function “Alter column set data type” you can transform some data types of a column to a data type that is less restrictive.

Following changes are possible (not reverse);

INT64 to NUMERIC, BIGNUMERIC or FLOAT64

NUMERIC to BIGNUMERIC or FLOAT64

Important: If you change the data type of a column that is referenced in a materialized view, the query will fail. So you have to delete the materialized view and create it new.

New Administrator views

Furthermore, there are two new administrative views in BigQuery available. With “BigQuery Admin Resource Charts” you can analyze the usage of BigQuery slots and jobs. To get more insights, how to use this monitoring tool, you can take a look here.

The view “Slot estimator” helps by predicting the needed slots for the BigQuery workload. Based on historical performance data, it estimates the need for slots in the future. A guide for this view you can find here.

Data Studio

New chart type “Gauge”

There is a new chart type available in Data Studio. With the gauge chart, you can define ranges and targets for the change of a measurement. Before this update, the gauge chart was just available as community visualization.

Left: Data Studio visualization, right: community visualization

To add a Gauge chart:

Adding a gauge chart to the report

This chart type takes a date range dimension for sure and one metric. The more interesting part is the style tab of the chart. There you can define one target and a maximum of 5 ranges.

The ranges define the background areas of the chart

The target is a line in the chart

The screenshot shows an example of a gauge chart. It has three ranges to 100000, 300000 and 500000. The target (black line) is 600000.

This is a nice improvement, but it has some restrictions. Some missing features are:

Give every range another color

Define the complete range of the half-circle

Add a dimension to breakdown the measurement

Text function improvement

Google removed one limitation for the functions to create calculated fields. For many text functions, you can add parameter values for the starting index or the length. But the problem was that you can just enter literal values and no values which are related to another field. And this is possible now.

Things like LEFT_TEXT(field_name, LENGTH(field_name_2)+1) is possible to get the number (depends on the length of another field value) of characters from the beginning.

New templates

Data Studio offers many templates to see the possibilities of creating dashboards. There are some new templates available now. You can find them here.

Google Analytics

Getting unsampled data

GA4 has already higher sampling limits than UA. If GA4 still sampling the result of your data request, you are able to get an unsampled result now. In the exploration menu, you see a green tick when there is no sampling in this report.

If this symbol has a red cross, the data is sampled and you can click on “Request unsampled results”. This data is available within 30 minutes after a page reload or in an email.

Summary card of archiving CDs and CMs

Getting more insights into the consequences, when the user wants to archive a custom dimension or metric in GA4. He/She will see a list of audiences, explorations, … that is affected of this change.

Google Tag Manager

Cross-domain server-side tracking

GTM got a little improvement. For server-side tracking, cross-domain measurement is easier/possible. You have to enable the settings inside the container and the related server containers must be in the same account.

Further Links

This post is part of the Google Data Analytics series from datadice and explains to you every month the newest features in BigQuery, Data Studio, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

If you want to learn more about how to use Google Data Studio and take it to the next level in combination with BigQuery, check our Udemy course here

If you are looking for help to set up a modern and cost-efficient data warehouse or just some analytical dashboards, send us an email to hello@datadice.io and we schedule a call.