Google has announced a very important change is coming to your Google Analytics data- if you track device types using isMobile and isTablet dimensions they have been eliminated.
But don’t worry, you’ll still be able to understand what devices are being used by using the new deviceCategory dimension, and you have at least 6 months as per the Google Analytics data deprecation policy.
If you are a user of Analytics Canvas, you may have already seen the notification when you were building queries.
This change will eventually mean that you’ll have to remove these dimensions from any queries you may have. You have a minimum of 6 months, but we strongly advise you switch now to deviceCategory, particularly for new queries.
You can see here in the Analytics Canvas query builder, both the notification regarding the changes, and what the data looks like;
The really key thing to notice is that with isMobile and isTablet there is overlap- Tablets are considered mobile.
In deviceCategory there is no overlap- so to get the same data that you currently get when isMobile is “Yes” you need to include BOTH isMobile and isTablet deviceCategories in a filter.
We’ll continue to keep you up to date on how the dimensions and metrics evolve, and for Analytics Canvas customers, you can look forward to new features for both understanding how and where deprecated metrics and dimensions are used in your queries, as well as some automatic renaming and management where possible to make the changes have as minimal an impact as possible.