Google Analytics 4 and Looker Studio are still evolving. Keeping up with all of the new features can be challenging so we have summarized the latest updates that we think you should know:
- Google has announced, there will be automatically created GA4 properties for all accounts that do not have GA4 yet beginning of March. As it is not clear how these properties will look like and work since they rely on the existing Universal Analytics Tags, we highly recommend to opt-out of this automated GA4 property creation in your Google Analytics account.
- Google Optimize will be sunset by September 30th, 2023 and cannot be used anymore. It is expected to see a new solution for experiments which might be directly integrated in GA4. However, there is no guarantees and no timelines which were announced as of today.
- Custom Channel Grouping is now available in a beta stage.
In our previous update, we already mentioned the new “quotas” for GA4 and Looker Studio. Below, we have outlined some more information on how to overcome these limitations.
- Since rebranding, Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) has changed its API limits to “quotas” as announced on 10th November 2022. Looker Studio reports which are connected with Google Analytics 4 are subject to Google Analytics Data API quotas. When quotas are exhausted this error message will appear:
Looker Studio provides some options for troubleshoot this issue:
- Reduce the traffic to the report, by sharing it with fewer people.
- Try to use fewer charts on each page.
- Work on your data by extracting it from the data set. This will make your report faster and more responsive when applying filters and data ranges.
- You could export your Google Analytics data to BigQuery, then use the BigQuery connector to visualize the data in Looker Studio. There is no limit doing so, but it will probably lead to costs in BigQuery.
Another option is to use chargeable third-party solutions to pull the data from GA4 into Looker Studio. We do not expect Google to improve the limitations set by the quotas, and therefore digital marketers will have to learn to work with and around the quota limits on Looker Studio.
If you missed our previous updates on GA4 make sure to read our previous article: Google Analytics Status Updates. We expect regular new announcements at least until 1st July 2023, when Universal Analytics will be permanently replaced by Google Analytics 4 so sign up to our newsletter to stay up-to-date.
Although your data will be still available for 6 months after Universal Analytics shuts off, be warned that it is not possible to transfer your data from Universal Analytics to GA4. We strongly recommend migrating to GA4 as soon as possible.
Get in touch if you have any questions about your data collection and storage strategy or about migrating to GA4.
