Every now and again, Google deprecates certain metrics and dimensions from within Google Analytics. Sami is here to tell us how this could affect you and your data, and where to find the latest information.
“The deprecation of metrics and dimensions is something to be aware of – especially if you use or manage dashboards or use GA APIs to pull data in to other tools.
This summer, Google decided to deprecate a number of dimensions from within Google Analytics – adSlotPosition, nextPagePath and nextContentGroupXX. Going forward you’ll need to use adSlot, pagePath and contentGroupXX respectively to obtain the same data.
This isn’t too much of a problem, but if you’re utilising dashboards or pulling data and using any of those dimensions, you’ll need to make some manual updates.
Within GA, your dashboards that use these will need to be reconfigured manually by editing the widget settings. If you’re pulling data via an API from a tool such as SuperMetrics, you’ll also need to go in and manually update your queries.
For those people out there that are taking regular data from GA, you can keep up to date on changes, such as metric/dimension deprecations, from the developer support pages. Here you’ll find a full change log of changes made in GA, AdWords, DoubleClick, etc.”
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