Workarounds to increase Custom Dimensions limits in Google Analytics 4

With Google Analytics v4 there are limitations in the number of custom definitions slots available. Most likely, thanks to the different scopes GA4 gives you available for your Custom Dimensions you should be fine with the information you have to transmit to GA4 during the data collection happening on your website. But if this is not the case, well, here below you’ll see that there are some workarounds to these limitations. Then, how to increase the Custom Dimensions (CDs) limit set by Google?

Let’s start looking at the actual limitations set by Google with GA4:

Event-scoped custom dimensions:

• Standard properties 50
• GA360 properties 125

User-scoped custom dimensions:

• Standard properties 25
• GA360 properties 100

Understand the Custom Dimension Scoping

On their roadmap, there are also other 2 “scopes” available for both custom dimensions and metrics which will further increase the overall limit. These 2 scopes are: “Session bases CDs” and “Product-based CDs”. The latter extremely useful to enhance the E-commerce funnel tracking capabilities

Apart from following the Best practices offered by Google on their documentation to optimise the choices around the custom dimensions we have a couple of tricks to increase the amount of information you can send to GA4:

Workarounds to not worry about the Custom Dimensions limit

• Transform Truthy/falsy CDs into custom metrics. If you have custom dimensions holding just 2 values you can instead leverage well-named custom metrics and work with 0/1 instead of consuming a CD slot.
• Concatenate CDs. This method is very useful if the final concatenated variable won’t reach 100 characters.
• Don’t scope, where possible, CDs both to user & event but try to leverage 1 scope for each variable.
• If you work with AB testing, depending on your needs, you can wait for the session-scoped custom dimensions to be implemented by Google and use it as opposed to user/event-scoped CDs
• If you use custom dimensions for Remarketing purposes, we suggest using Tealium Audiencestream to set a Google ADS connector and enrich it using the Tealium datalayer

Using these tricks you’ll surely have a greater amount of information transmitted to Google Analytics. If you’d ever need any support in managing your GA collection and your Tealium profile we offer a free 15 mins consultation call to start discussing improvements for your User Tracking Environment.