Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison at Google, announced on LinkedIn that Google Analytics is getting some updates to help ‘enhance data completeness’.
GA4 is rolling out aggregate identifiers to help improve attribution accuracy for Google Ads when GCLID isn’t available. Where GCLID or aggregate identifiers are not available, the fallback will be manual tagging through UTMS. According to Google, this will prevent Google Ads traffic from being incorrectly attributed to the Organic Channel.
Also mentioned are new reporting features that will highlight when the data received by GA4 doesn’t have data for the Source & Medium traffic dimensions. If your reports have a notification which says “data is not available”, this will typically mean that you can’t do much to improve it. If you see “not set”, this indicates that steps could be taken to improve the data coming into GA4, and you’ll be presented with some tooltips to help.
The final updates were a new Data Quality Indicator at the top of reports that will help users resolve potential issues with links that could be causing attribution errors, and System Generated Annotations, which will be added to highlight changes that could impact your data measurement.
