SEOIntel Weekly News Round-up (Third Week of April 2025)

As the third week of April kicks off, Google has rolled out key updates to improve marketing, search, and retail insights. Google Analytics now offers enhanced data accuracy, deeper analysis, and proactive alerts to help marketers fix issues early. Google Search has become significantly faster, saving users over a million hours daily, according to VP Rajan Patel. Meanwhile, the Google Merchant Center introduced a popular products report that highlights best-selling items and top brands, helping retailers optimize their strategies with real-time insights. These improvements boost efficiency and decision-making across Google’s platforms.

Google Analytics 4 Addresses Missing Data and Identifies Problems at an Early Stage

Google Analytics is introducing significant enhancements designed to refine marketing to data accuracy, added depth of analysis, and proactive alerts to help identify and address potential issues before they escalate.

Google Unveils Latest Enhancements to Google Analytics 4 Platform:

• Enhanced data completeness. New aggregate IDs and smart fallback tools keep reports accurate even without traditional tracking, helping you see campaign performance clearly while honoring user consent.

• Updated data presentation. Labels like “(data not available)” and “(not set)” add clarity, helping you spot gaps and know where to take action.

• Proactive issue detection. A new data quality indicator and auto-generated notes act as early warnings, helping marketers catch and fix tracking issues before they mess with data.

• If Google Analytics detects issues like large rates of missing session_start events – often caused by misconfigured tags – you will now receive notifications directly in the UI with guidance on how to fix them.

Google Representative Speaks to Search Engine Land:

• “These updates are part of our ongoing efforts to improve data quality and help marketers get the insights they need to move their business forward.”

Data attribution has become a top priority for marketers in today’s landscape. The latest updates aim to tackle the escalating issue of data loss resulting from evolving privacy regulations and increasing consumer consent requirements.

This latest update can help ensure precise measurements even in the face of obstacles. By identifying potential issues early on and offering targeted solutions, it aims to enhance the quality of data-driven decision-making, all while prioritizing and honoring users’ preferences regarding their personal data.

To validate the effectiveness of these new updates, it’s crucial to benchmark their performance against your own internal data.

The modifications are occurring due to the influence of privacy regulations and browser updates on the way businesses gather and assess customer information. This emphasizes the growing importance of accuracy and dependability in making well-informed marketing choices.

Google’s Search Speed Has Increased Dramatically – But by What Margin?

Google has announced that it has significantly improved the speed of its Search function, according to Rajan Patel, Google Search’s Vice President of Engineering, who shared the news on X. The company has also published a detailed blog post on the upgrade, which I initially opted not

Rajan stated that they have improved the speed of Search, leading to significant time savings for users. This enhancement has resulted in a collective saving of 1 million hours per day, equivalent to over 100 hours saved in the time it takes to read his tweet.

The blog post mentions that in the last two years, the enhancements in latency have collectively resulted in saving users more than 1 million hours daily.

Barry was taken aback by that statement, especially since Google had just announced in February that they had speed up Search by a notable 67 milliseconds. However, when Google mentioned a two-year quite align with Rajan’s characterization of it as a “recent” development in his tweet.

Google reported that it accelerated mobile search results by 100-150 milliseconds in 2014, building on improvements made the previous year, when search speeds increased by 200-400 milliseconds.

Barry requested additional data from Google when they issued their press release, but unfortunately, I didn’t receive a response.

Google Search has experienced significant speed improvements in the last two years, making it a relatively new development.

Online conversation taking place on X.

Latest Report on Bestselling Items in Google Merchant Center

The Google Merchant Center now includes a new report called the popular products report. This report provides information on your best-selling products, preferred brands, and top-performing items across Google.

Hana Kobzová was the first to notice this and shared her discovery on both Feed blog and LinkedIn page. According to Hana, this new information will be invaluable in informing inventory decisions, identifying products that are at risk of selling out, and pinpointing those that are currently popular on Google Search.

This information is derived from your Merchant Center product catalog, as well as your product availability and sales regions.

Hana’s screenshots of this are shown below:

Hana mentioned that the service is currently available in 36 countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Czechia, Slovakia, and India, among others.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.