Data Analysis – News
Whether you’re a charity, a business, a digital marketer, or simply a data enthusiast, it pays to stay up-to-date and in-the-loop with news and insights from the ever-proliferating world of data analytics.
Data analysis is the bedrock of good business strategy, allowing you to effectively allocate resources, know exactly where and how to optimise content, identify trends and patterns in their early stages, and make predictive assessments that’ll help you get ahead of competitors.
Especially with the recent move from Universal Analytics to GA4, it’s vital for advertisers to keep up with new GA4 features as they’re rolled out and refined.
Discover all the latest developments here, with succinct commentary by our industry experts.
Latest story:
Google Tag Manager and Google Tag are coming together: What does it mean?
24/08/26
Google is bringing Google Tag and Google Tag Manager much closer together, with the aim of making Google measurement easier to manage from one place. And there are a few genuinely useful bits in the update.
The one we’re most interested in is the new visual data flow map, showing where data is being sent across Google Analytics, Google Ads and Floodlight.
Instead of digging through a GTM container, trying to work out what’s connected to what, you’ll be able to see it at a glance. For anyone managing complex measurement setups, that’s a pretty significant improvement. Google is also introducing no-code event tracking, initially focused on purchase conversions, alongside an in-account guide to help optimise existing GTM containers.
But there’s a small caveat. If you have multiple Google tags on a site, it’s worth checking how they’re configured before combining or optimising them. Some settings, including cross-domain tracking, internal traffic and unwanted referrals, can be shared across destinations connected to the same Google tag. So, if you’ve deliberately kept tags separate because they have different configurations, don’t just combine them because Google has offered you a shiny new button.
The good news is that nothing changes automatically, and Google says you’ll be able to preview proposed changes before publishing them.
Our take:
For charities, where GA4, Google Ads, Floodlight and multiple agencies can all sit within the same measurement ecosystem, this should make tagging easier to understand and easier to manage.
We’ll also be reviewing the implications for Charity Digital Benchmark as this rolls out, particularly around destination configuration and user governance across Benchmark implementations.
For charities, this is a good opportunity to document your Google tagging setup. Make a note of which tags are running, where they’re sending data and which settings are deliberately different. That way, when Google’s optimisation prompt appears, you’ll know what should be combined, what should stay separate and what needs checking before you hit publish.
UK government launches probe in Google's anticompetitive practices.
17/01/25
Last year we followed closely the US Department of Justice’s (still ongoing) investigation into Google’s illegal anti-competitive practices. Given the company’s international scope, it was only a matter of time before other governments around the world caught up.
This month we learned the UK Competition and Markets Authority has launched an investigation of its own, seeking to “assess Google’s position in search and search advertising services and how this impacts consumers and businesses.” Will anything come of it?
The probe is following a very similar line to the DOJ’s court case last year, where Google was found guilty of anticompetitive practices. They are now attempting to have Google divest itself of its Chrome browser, among other restrictions.
If anything, anti-competition laws are more powerful in the UK, so the ability of the CMA to impose significant restrictions if it believes them needed would be far greater.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on how this unfolds, but it appears that Google’s peaceful start to 2025 lasted exactly 14 days.
Civic Cookie Control May Be Inflating Your Sessions Data
09/08/23
We’ve recently noticed in some clients’ accounts an issue with Civic Cookie Control and GA4, causing discrepancies between actual and reported sessions data.
Civic’s cookie implementation has been overwriting Google Analytics cookies, so that on each page a new cookie is generated. Because the current page’s cookie is completely new, Google is reading and reporting that as a new session, meaning sessions are being inflated in GA4.
If your cookies are being hosted by Civic, or you’re unsure which service is hosting them, this is definitely worth a check.
From what we’ve seen, the fastest method to check whether your cookie implementation is affecting your sessions, is to go to Engagement Overview in GA4 and compare page_view and session_start. If session_start is almost the same or higher, that’s a sign to then compare your GA4 data against UA.
The fix to the problem on the backend is for your web developers to go into Civic cookie settings and manually set the _ga_<Tag Manager ID> cookie to a wildcard.
For a refresher on the role of cookies and how they work, who not take a look through our Cookie Explainer Series?