I Despise This New Engagement Tactic

+ Misleading GA4 data

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Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 33 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.

Highlights from Friday’s updates:

• News Industry Most Affected by Latest Google Update

• Beware of ‘Algospeak’ on Your Channels

• New Facebook Features for Creators

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Contents

Tip: Don’t Trust Default Channel Groupings in GA4

Analysis: I Despise This New Engagement Tactic

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Tip: Don’t Trust Default Channel Groupings in GA4

Default channel groupings in Google Analytics 4 are the “big-bucket” referral categories. e.g. Organic Search or Email.

This is a great way to see all your traffic from a particular category in the same place.

But there’s a catch.

To see for yourself, follow me to Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

By default, in the table at the bottom , you’ll probably see Session default channel grouping as the primary dimension (i.e. the left-most column).

Click the + sign above the second column and add Session source as a secondary dimension.

In this screenshot, everything looks good. news.google.com belongs in Organic Search, t.co (Twitter) belongs in Organic Social, and so on.

What happens when we dig deeper, though?

Type mail.google.com in the search filter box. Does anything come up?

In my case, mail.google.com – Gmail – is grouped under Organic search, when it should clearly be Email.

Depending on your website and its referrals, you may get a different result. But if you review all the session sources and their corresponding default channel groupings, I’m confident you’ll find other outliers.

Across various clients’ dashboards, as well as my own for bradgerick.com, I see these inconsistencies.

I point this out so that you don’t take default channel grouping reports at face value.

In Universal Analytics, there was a fairly straightforward way to change default channel grouping rules. In GA4, that’s not the case.

In next week’s analysis, I’ll show you a workaround to more accurately group referral sources.

Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.

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Analysis: I Despise This New Engagement Tactic

There was a time when people were embarrassed by their mistakes. Enough so that they not only fixed them, but often appended a correction, too.

Now, some creators have resorted to intentionally making errors to boost engagement.

Capitalizing on the fact that people love to be right – or even better, point out when others are wrong – there are some who have found value in mistake-ridden content to garner more interactions.

When you see this happening, it’s probably because the person doesn’t believe in their content enough for it to stand on its own.

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