After searching around, I came across this post (https://yoast.com/google-analytics-5/) which contained this comment from Yoast:
To all those asking about custom variables: custom variables were, unfortunately, deprecated by Google. Their “replacement” are custom dimensions and custom metrics, but they didn’t create an API to create those, so you have to do that in the GA Admin. As the whole setup process for those because of that becomes completely convoluted, we decided to not support those in our free plugin. We simply wouldn’t be able to provide the support people will probably need in that process at the scale this would work out to.
Now the good news is: our upcoming premium GA plugin will contain support for them, but it’s not going to be released next week, or next month.
If you really need the data, go back to the old version until we release our premium version… Wish there was a better way but there truly isn’t.
So sounds like those of us that need this feature should turn of Universal Analytics. Just disappointed that I had to go searching to get some kind of explanation. I wouldn’t have upgraded to Universal had I known about this ahead of time.
