Guide To Channel Grouping in GA4

Channel grouping in GA4 offers valuable insights into how your website traffic is distributed across various channels. They are basically the names given to sets of channels that Google defines according to certain rules.

GA4’s channel groups help you find out how people arrive at your website and which channels are bringing in the most visitors. Besides that, you can discover which pages are best for turning visitors into customers. Thus, they help you understand which channels are driving revenue and where to focus your marketing efforts.

Let’s dive deeper into what GA4 channel grouping offers and how you can use these channel groups.

Default Channel Grouping in GA4

Default channel grouping shows how your website traffic is being distributed across different channels, such as paid search, email, and organic shopping.

Below, you can find the most common channel groups and use case examples in GA4:

Direct

Direct traffic tracks visitors who arrive from sources such as bookmarks (saved links), direct URL entry, or unknown sources without being redirected from another site. But sometimes direct traffic isn’t truly direct. This means that it shows users who are coming from unidentified links.?

Thus, it is important to note that direct traffic in GA4 sometimes represents channels that aren’t assigned correctly.?

Organic search

In GA4, organic search refers to all search engine traffic that is not paid for. It doesn't include paid SERP results like Google Shopping ads.

Paid search

Paid search is the traffic that comes from pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engines like Google Ads.

Organic shopping

Traffic is classified as organic shopping in GA4 when users access your website through unpaid links on shopping sites such as Google Shopping Free Listings or Amazon.

Cross-network

Cross-network channel allows people to find your website through ads on other networks. For example, a user might click on paid ads generated by the Performance Max or Smart Shopping campaigns.

Email

Email traffic occurs when someone clicks on a link in an email, like a newsletter, and lands on your website.

Referral

Referral traffic is visitors who find your site through links on other websites that aren’t social networks. This could be a blog, a review site, and more.

Although these are the most commonly used channel groups, we highly recommend you read Google’s documentation on default channel groupings to learn more about other channel groups and their definitions.

How To View Channel Groups in GA4

There are multiple options for finding GA4 channel groups and traffic sources.?

Let’s investigate each individually.

Method 1 | Using Traffic Acquisition Report

The traffic acquisition report tells you the first source of traffic for each new session.

Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Change the dimension to Session default channel grouping.

Method 2 | Using User Acquisition Report

The user acquisition report tells you how new visitors find your website at first. Go to Reports > Acquisition > User Acquisition. Choose First user default channel grouping.

If the first user source includes organic, for example, it means that these are users who arrived at your website for the first time via Google Search.

Method 3 | Using Conversions Report

You can also check the conversions report to see the traffic sources for users who converted.

The conversions report reveals traffic source data for every conversion event. If a user makes a purchase, the conversion report shows where they came from. This user is considered converted after buying an item.

Method 4 | Using Exploration

To get to this data, go to the Explore section. Create a new exploration. Set the dimension to Default Channel Group (you can add more dimensions) and select the metrics you want to use, such as total users, engaged sessions, and revenue.

After importing dimensions and metrics, double-click each of them to add to the report.

Besides these default channels, two cases can be observed in GA4 reports:

1. First, when you don’t assign new traffic to the right default channel group, GA4 will label it unassigned. To prevent this, it's crucial to identify and address unassigned channels. If you're wondering how to identify unassigned channels in GA4, follow this guide on unassigned traffic in Google Analytics.
2. Second, the channel grouping report might display (other) row. The wrong GA4 setup or an issue called cardinality may cause (other) label. Learn more about cardinality and how to avoid (other) from reports.

Limitations and Best Practices

Here’s an overview of what you need to know while using GA4 channel groupings:

• You can’t remove or modify the default channel groups. Instead, you need to use Google’s definitions to tag your landing page URLs for accurate tracking.

For example, the following URL will be counted as “email” under default channel grouping in GA4 >> www.example.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=contentpromotion

• You can’t use new channels with the existing groups.
• If the campaigns’ UTM parameters do not align with Google's definitions, the data will be tracked as unassigned. If you’re not familiar with UTM parameters, don’t forget to check out our video tutorial about UTM setup on Ads.

• GA4 offers a number of predefined channel groups, but custom channel grouping is currently accessible in GA4. You can create your own channel groups to meet your needs.?

To set up your own custom channel groups, you can use this comprehensive guide on custom channel grouping.

To gain a better understanding of traffic sources and channel groups, you should also understand how GA4 determines sessions. A user’s session begins when they visit your website or app and ends when they leave.

Conclusion

Now, you have discovered channel grouping in GA4, how they differ due to rule-based definitions, and the default channel groupings.

GA4's flexible explore section allows us to create one-time custom reports for analysis even though we can't change the rules.

To properly group traffic under the right channels, UTM tags must be standardized and used correctly.

In GA4, you can export data to BigQuery if UTM tagging causes data pollution. There, you can both query it and set rules for how the data should be assigned to its channels.