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

Latest Updates on Google Data Analytics (April 2021)

The highlights of the updates on BigQuery, Data Studio, Google Analytics (GA) & Google Tag Manager (GTM). By Alexander Junke datadice Follow Apr 30 · 3 min read

Photo by Yolanda Sun 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

In BigQuery you can now change easily a non-clustered table to a clustered table and vice versa. Furthermore it is possible to change the number and type of columns the table is clustered by. Before this change you had to delete the original table and then create the new one with the same name and new clustered columns.

With standard SQL you can now delete single columns in a table, with the use of ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN (except of partitioned columns, clustered columns and nested columns inside a record).

Additionally the maximum length of column names and the names of UDFs is now increased from 128 to 300 characters.

Data Studio

In Data Studio now you have the possibility to use these 3 functions

COALESCE

IFNULL

NULLIF

COALESCE

You type in a list of available fields of the data source and the first field value, which is not NULL, gets returned.

IFNULL

This function receives a field as the first parameter and if that field value is NULL, then the value of the second parameter gets returned, else the value of the first parameter.

NULLIF

NULLIF works the other way around, so when the value of the first parameter matches the expression then it returns NULL, else the input parameter.

These functions are just nice to have and the handling of the data source fields is in special cases easier. But the same functionalities you can also build with the CASE-WHEN or IF functions.

Data Studio now has a new button on the top right corner in the view mode. With that button you can reset all filters you set on the report. So the whole report has the same status when you access it the first time after the reset.

the reset button in the menu

Another good improvement are the community visualizations that now are working in embedded reports.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics had no big updates, just some new metrics, especially for analysis of gaming apps. Furthermore Google now offers new ways to measure user-engagement in the BigQuery export of the GA4 data.

Google Tag Manager

There are no new features released, they just wrote a setup guide to establish server-side tracking. You can take a look here.

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