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, Looker 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, Looker Studio, Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager.
Google is heavily promoting the BigQuery ML features. I am not an ML expert, so I will just mention the most important features.
The primary and foreign key constraints in BigQuery have the status of generally available now. Additionally, there are 2 new features:
Dataform is a service integrated with BigQuery that allows building data transformation pipelines with version controlling, testing and deploying. Due to that the developers are working in a repository they need to commit and push the changes.
Now it is possible to select the files you want to commit. If there are files you are still working on, but you want to commit some of the changes already, you just select the needed files.
There are intervals in time-series charts available. With intervals, you get a better overview of the accuracy of your data and the data range.
In one chart you can add up to 4 intervals. For one interval you can set up the following options:
Later we will do an own blog post for it where we will go through the types and modes.
Further information you can find here.
Google added already some months ago the reference line to compare the actual values with some kind of a target line. Now there is also a band available, two lines relying on each other. Possibilities would be to
For every line in your Looker Studio dashboard charts, you can now change some basic style settings. The following options are available:
For dropdown filters, you can choose the so-called single-select. Now the option “Allow Select All” is available.
Google still adds features to the Looker Studio Pro version and I want to mention them:
There are some new revenue metrics available in the exploration mode.
Additionally the two duplicated revenue metrics “Ecommerce revenue” and “Event revenue” are deleted. Reports with these metrics will still work until the metric is changed once.
Every conversion event can have a default value that comes into action if no “value” and “currency” parameter is sent in the event. Then the event gets always the default value assigned every time when the event occurs.
The focus of GA4 is creating custom reports by the Analysts. We already discussed a new update for the explore mode. The custom report builder got some new dimensions and metrics.
No further release for the Google Tag Manager.
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.
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We also started with our own YouTube channel. We talk about important DWH, BigQuery, Data Studio and many more topics. Check out the channel here.
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 analytical dashboards, send us an email to hello@datadice.io and we will schedule a call.