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, Dataform, 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, Dataform, Looker Studio, Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager.
BigQuery
Tags for datasets
The new BigQuery tables are all quick and easy to explain.
You are already able to add tags to tables to have more granular control over the user permissions. Now the same behavior is possible for datasets. You can add tags to datasets and grant permissions for single users to several tags.
Add tags to datasets
Scheduling notebooks
After publishing the new BigQuery Studio environment you can also use Jupyter Notebooks more native in BigQuery.
Now it is possible to run these notebooks regularly. The output will be pushed to a Cloud Storage bucket which you select during the setup of the schedule creation.
More information can be found here.
JupyterLab plugin
This new BigQuery JupyterLab plugin supports you in exploring your data.
After installing the plugin, you should see in JupyerLab the BigQuery datasets you selected during installation.
In there, you can execute notebooks or deploying a DataFrame notebook.
How to do this all you can take a look here.
Dataform
New Dataform framework
There is the 3.0.0 framework for Dataform available.
This update is about the dataform.json which is the workflow_settings.yaml now. In existing repositories, you do not need to make the change. If you want to convert you can look at this guide.
The changes you can check in one of our older blog posts (under New Beta version).
Manual compilation details
When you manually trigger a new compilation for a release configuration they are shown in a separate table now.
In Dataform, after selecting the repository > Releases and Scheduling > Selecting the needed release configuration you see the wanted details.
The first list shows all automatic compilation results and the list below the manual executions.
Release configuration details
Looker Studio
Group Others
This functionality was already there before, but now it is available for more chart types and I think it is a good moment to show this feature again.
In most of the charts you have in the configurations, the possibility to limit the number of entries, and the rest will be grouped as “Others”.
Group others option
This option is useful, to show the amount of certain dimensions in comparison to the total rest of not shown values.
Pie chart: The yellow pie is “Others”, Table: The last line shows “Others”
This option is now available for:
- Table charts
- Time series charts
- Bar charts
- Column charts
- Pie charts
- Line/Combo charts
- Area charts
- Pivot table charts
- Treemap charts
New settings for data labels
In certain chart types like Bar, Line, or Area charts you can add data labels now. The look of these labels can be customized in the usual settings like font size, color, font type, background and more.
Data label options
Note: If you select “Bar label position: Above” you can not change the color of the font.
Colored labels in bar diagram
Bin field type
The Bin field type is a new calculated field you can create in your Looker Studio dashboards/data sources.
With this new field, you can set ranges for a chosen value and the bin field you can use as a dimension in your charts then.
Let us take a look at how to set up this field type:
- You can create this field type in the data source or directly in the chart
- To create it in the datasource, go to the fields list of the datasource > click on Add a Field > Add bin
Create a bin calculated field
Note: In the example we are using the equal-sized bin configuration. You can also use the custom-sized setting, where you can select every single breakdown on your own.
Then you can use this bin field as a dimension e.g. in a bar chart:
Order Ranges
Google Analytics
Advertising segments
Under advertising > Tools > Advertising segments you can see the advertising segments. These are GA audiences that are connected with advertised products.
The same segments can be found in the audience segments in the GAds Audience Manager. In additionally to the segment names you can see the audience size for Search, YouTube, Display, and Gmail campaigns
List of segments
Key event rate in acquisitions reports
In one of the last blog posts I already described the idea behind key events.
Long story short: Conversions in Google Analytics are now called key events.
The acquisition reports on user or session level includes the key event rate now. The rate describes in how many sessions a key event happened or for how many users. You can define if all key events should be taken into account or just one of them.
Acquisition report
Custom event data import
Uploading data to GA4 you can already do. So it was possible to add data for costs, items, user data, …. And now you can also upload custom event data.
You need to start in the admin section of your property and click on Data Collection and Modification > Data import.
Import Custom Events
How to properly build the CSV and select the key and import fields you can check out here.
Google Tag Manager
Tag Diagnostics Tool
Finally, the first bigger update for GTM in the year 2024!
It is a new quality analysis tool for your general tracking. You see it on the overview page of your GTM container.
Tag Manager Overview
When you click on “View 1 issue”, you see a detailed list of recommended actions:
Action Items
Possible feedbacks are:
- Some of your pages are not tagged
- Missing conversion linkers
- Additional domains detected for configuration
Google additionally announced that more checks and recommendations are upcoming in the future.
Upcoming datadice blog posts for this month
- Power BI - Coming Soon
- Eza Terminal - Coming Soon
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.
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