Anomaly
A word I can neither pronounce nor spell. But a new feature of GA4 that I love…but maybe not for the reason you may think.
So – Anomaly: something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified : something anomalous They regarded the test results as an anomaly. 2 : deviation from the common rule : irregularity. 3 : the angular distance of a planet from its perihelion as seen from the sun.
And Anomaly Detection in GA4: Anomaly detection is a statistical technique that Analytics Intelligence uses to identify anomalies in time-series data for a given metric, and anomalies within a segment at the same point of time. You can read more detail here.
But the reason I find this fascinating is because it brings me back to the days of ClickTracks. Yup. My favorite web analytics solution ever. Back in the day, I guess it was around 2008 (maybe a little earlier, it was a long time ago), ClickTracks launched the ‘What’s Changed’ report.
It was essentially Anomaly Detection 2008. You can read in great detail how awesome it was back then and why it is still so super important here. (Thanks, Avinash!).
