Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 49* of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
*Out of order this week
Tip & Analysis: How To (Finally) Customize GA4 Channels
What are Channel Groups in Google Analytics 4?
Channel groups are “big bucket” categorizations of how traffic came to your website or app. Google calls them “rule-based categories for your website's traffic sources.” Inside those buckets are the limitless sources and mediums, which also indicate how users got to your site.
Channel groups have always existed. The news here is that, until recently, you couldn’t customize them in GA4 like you could in Universal Analytics.
Why Customize Channel Groups?
Google does its best to categorize your traffic into the correct channels, but it’s not always right. For example, I have worked with properties where mail.google.com (aka Gmail) was included in the Organic Search channel.
You may also get a significant amount of traffic from a less common source that Google doesn’t know how to bucket.
In either case, you’ll want to customize your channels to ensure accurate data analysis.
Taking that faulty Gmail example, imagine your overall Organic Search channel traffic was 10,000 users per month, and 2,000 of those users came from Gmail. If you didn’t “clean up” your channel, you would be crediting your search traffic for 25 percent more traffic than it actually earned, while also depriving your Email channel of 2,000 users.
In summary, it’s all about accurate reporting.
Channel Group Limits
Standard (unpaid) GA4 accounts can have two channel groups, and within those groups, you can have up to 25 channels.
Google says “The default predefined channel group does not count toward the limit on groups.” You also can’t alter the default channel.
Before you customize your default channel groups, you need to understand how users are getting to your site. The best way to do that is by analyzing sources and mediums, respectively, which you’ll be able to use to customize channel groupings.
1) To get started, go to your GA4 dashboard and click on the events tab – the second one down on the left of the screenshot below step 3.
2) Then open the Life cycle menu, click Acquisition and Traffic acquisition.
3) Depending on how much traffic your site gets, make sure your data range is set back between 30 (high-traffic sites) and 90 or more (lower traffic sites) days. (If you’re feeling ambitious, you can do all-time traffic, even if you have a big site. The main idea here is to catch miscategorizations.) That way you capture all meaningful referral sources and ensure maximum accuracy for your channels.
You should see something like this. (Make sure to click “Apply” after selecting your date range.)
4) As you scroll down, your table data is probably displayed based on Session default channel group. Click the dropdown and change that to Session source / medium.
You should now see something like this:
5) Now click the three connected dots icon (in a blue circle below), click Download File and download it as a CSV.
Your spreadsheet should look something like this:
Now it’s time to review each of your source / medium items (column A) and determine if they’re categorized under the correct channel (column B).
If you have a limited number of sources / mediums, like in the screenshot above, you can probably review all of them.
If you have hundreds, however, you can probably set a minimum threshold of 10 or more sessions per month, or only review the top 100, for example.
Once you have determined what channel each of your sources / mediums should go into, return to GA4.
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