H1 Google Analytics Roadmap inside track

Last week we attended the Google Analytics H1 roadmap webinar and came away with a clear picture of where things are heading.

We cannot share the specifics (NDA firmly in place) but we can tell you what actually matters for your planning. Use this to steer your digital marketing roadmap for the rest of the year.

Expect serious investment in data strength

Data strength is a measure of how well your data meets the bar Google AI needs to genuinely maximise your ROI. It is not a soft metric. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

Ask yourself:

• Are you collecting every possible data point available to you?

• Where are you losing data along the way?

• Is your data collection durable, built to last as the landscape shifts?

• Is your data wide enough in breadth and deep enough in quality?

• Are you actually activating everything you collect?

  
  

These are uncomfortable questions. They require proper tools and proper support. Expect significant progress in this area in 2026.

First-party data is the essential ingredient, full stop

Duga POV: Third party cookie deprecation by Chrome was a short term, aggressive move. Shifting the tactical focus to 1P data activation is a smart, longer term initiative to deliver the strategic goal of third party atrophy.

You need to think online and offline, real time and async data collection

Duga POV: Third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome was an aggressive short-term move. The shift toward first-party data activation is a smarter, longer-term initiative, one designed to achieve the strategic goal of third-party atrophy over time.

If you are not already treating first-party data as your primary asset, now is the time to change that.

Think online and offline. Think real-time and asynchronous. Data collection is not a single-channel discipline any more.

Read our last post on connecting online advertising to offline conversions. There is genuinely exciting tooling coming in this space, the kind of capability we have not seen rolled out for some time.

Attribution is improving, and fast

It is still remarkable that attribution remains as difficult as it is. The problem is not getting simpler. More spam, more bots, and more bad actors are making it harder. The emergence of AI agents adds another layer of complexity too: not all automated traffic is unwanted, and understanding what agents are doing in your ecosystem is going to become increasingly important to measure and account for.

The good news is that the tools are catching up, and quickly.

GTG and sGTM are non-negotiable, and here is why

There is growing attention on first-party infrastructure, and rightly so. Google Tag Gateway and server-side Google Tag Manager together deliver robust data collection with privacy and efficiency built in. They satisfy the data strength requirement, and the case for adopting them has very little downside. That case will only get stronger as the year progresses.

If these are not already on your roadmap, they need to be.