Default Channel Grouping in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Navigating the new landscape of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) requires a fresh approach to traffic categorization. With its advanced predefined groups, GA4 offers improved automatic categorization over its predecessor, Universal Analytics. Yet, for marketers and analysts accustomed to extensive customization, GA4's limited options for creating custom channel groups present new challenges.

This article takes a look into adjusting campaign tagging to align with GA4’s channel groupings, the implications of setting a custom channel group as the primary, and strategies for effectively managing these limitations. Learn how to leverage GA4’s channel grouping features to enhance reporting accuracy and gain deeper insights into your traffic data.

Note: This post was originally published in December 2022 as a comparison between GAU and GA4 and was completely updated in September 2024 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Channel Grouping in Google Analytics (GA4) is a method of categorizing traffic into meaningful channels, allowing marketers and analysts to understand the origins and behaviors of their website visitors.

By default, GA4 provides a set of predefined channels such as Organic Search, Direct, Email, Paid, and Social, but users do have the ability to create custom channel groupings to better align with their marketing strategies.

The ability to create custom channel groups is very limited. This can complicate the work of marketers and analysts:

• Marketers will have to adjust their campaign tagging methods so that campaign traffic is properly allocated to the new GA4 channel groups. Additionally, GA4 allows users to designate a custom channel group as the primary channel group, impacting how future website traffic is categorized and reported.
• Analysts now have to create custom channel groups manually and repeat this procedure each time a new report is needed. The primary channel group feature helps streamline this process by setting a default for channel grouping reports, though it comes with certain limitations.

Channel grouping in Google Analytics 4 offers several benefits, including-:

• Streamlined Traffic Analysis: Categorizes user interactions into meaningful groups for a clearer view of traffic sources.
• Improved Marketing Insights: Identifies the most effective marketing channels, facilitating campaign optimization.
• Efficient Resource Allocation: Helps allocate resources more effectively by understanding which channels perform best.
• User Behavior Understanding: Aids in comprehending user behavior, allowing for enhanced engagement strategies.
• Personalized Content: Tailors content to better match audience preferences, leading to improved user experiences.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: Enables data-driven decisions, adapting to changing market dynamics for better performance.

In the transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the concept of Channel Grouping remains important but with notable differences.

GA4 channel grouping introduces more advanced machine learning capabilities, enabling it to automatically categorize traffic sources more accurately. This offers a deeper understanding of user behavior and marketing performance.

GA4 also includes mobile push notifications as a channel. These represent users who engage with a site or app through messages sent to their mobile devices when they are not actively using the application. This channel helps analyze user traffic and behavior stemming from these notifications.

Additionally, GA4 allows for greater flexibility in custom channel groupings, making it a more adaptable choice for businesses seeking detailed insights. While Universal Analytics offers standard predefined channel groupings, GA4 provides a more advanced and customizable approach to analyzing and categorizing web traffic.

Compared to Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) now has 19 more default channel groups:

You can also apply custom channel grouping for Google Ads traffic:

• Paid Search
• Paid Video
• Display
• Cross-network
• Paid Social

Here is the list of channels for Display & Video 360 traffic:

• Display
• Paid Video
• Audio
• Paid Other

And last, sometimes important - channels for Search Ads 360 traffic:

• Paid Search
• Paid Social

Some Google Analytics universal channel groups remain unchanged in GA4, such as Direct or Organic Search.

Certain groups in Google Analytics 4 have been given broader definitions, such as Email, Affiliates, and Paid Search.

Some groups were not in Universal Analytics at all, such as Paid Social, Organic Social, and Video.

Additionally, all the channels in Google Analytics 4 are divided into four subgroups:

1. Channels for manual traffic
2. Channels for Google Ads traffic
3. Channels for Display & Video 360 traffic
4. Channels for Search Ads 360 traffic

What else is different about channel grouping in Google Analytics 4?

• You cannot add new channels to the default channel group
• You cannot edit the rules for the default channel group

Note: Unlike Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 is case-insensitive in UTM tags, so it requires you to make the tags easy to read and interpret. Keep the tags lowercase. You can also add spaces as long as you make sure that the format stays consistent.

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), default channel grouping classifies incoming traffic into distinct categories, allowing you to analyze the sources of your website visitors.

These predefined default channel groupings include:

• "Direct" (users who enter your URL directly)
• "Organic Search" (traffic from search engine results)
• "Referral" (visitors from other websites)
• "Social" (social media referrals)
• "Email" (email marketing)
• "Paid Search" (search engine advertising)
• "Display" (display advertising)
• "Other" (uncategorized sources)

These GA4 default channel groupings provide a quick overview of your website's traffic sources, aiding in understanding user behavior and marketing effectiveness.

The default channel groups also have dimensions known as:

• Default channel grouping: The channels by which users arrive at your site/app
• Session default channel grouping: The channels by which users arrive at your site/app when they initiate a new session
• First user default channel grouping: The channels by which users first arrive at your site/app

Open Google Analytics 4 and go to the Reports section in the tab on the left.

Open the reports in the Acquisition section:

Choose the Traffic acquisition report, which contains all summaries of channel groupings:

To view statistics in terms of channel grouping, select Session default channel group in the drop-down list:

In this report, you will find:

• a breakdown of users by channel group by day
• the total number of users by channel group for the selected period
• a detailed table with data on the main metrics (sessions, users, events, conversions, etc.)

Custom Channel Grouping in GA4 enables users to define unique groupings that align with their marketing strategies beyond the default channels. Users can categorize traffic by setting specific rules and conditions to reflect their business goals, allowing for more granular analysis.

Custom channel groups in GA4 can be set as the main dimension in many reports, like Acquisition, and as a secondary dimension in standard reports, such as Events. They are also usable in custom reports, explorations, and for creating audience conditions. Notably, they can reorganize past report data. However, one limitation is their inapplicability in the Conversions paths report, restricting their use in some advanced analyses.

By utilizing custom channel grouping in Google Analytics 4 you can customize them according to your own rules; it will be more convenient to analyze their effectiveness and see the whole picture. Google Analytics 4 is not flexible — you must adjust the UTM structure to match the channel groups.

The correct UTM markup will matter more in Google Analytics 4 . And the more employees and partners you have involved in marketing campaigns, the more difficult it will be to bring it all into the right form and a unified structure.

Unlike the GA4 default channel grouping, a custom channel group can be applied to historical data. This way, you can fix possible errors in UTM markup.

Let's summarize the benefits of custom channel grouping:

• Transparency — you can group channels according to your own logic that is understandable to you, and not rely on a conditional black box.
• Fewer problems with UTM tags and possible errors in them
• Possibility to change the channel grouping logic for historical data
• If you don't require extensive external reporting or analysis, utilizing API might not be necessary.

1. You're using a custom traffic source and/or channel.
2. Google Analytics shows several different referrals for the same channel in reports. For example, Facebook. With the help of GA4 custom grouping, all these referrals can be combined into one Facebook group.

3. Different traffic sources are part of the same marketing channel. For example, Google Analytics can report traffic from emails such as Newsletter/email, owox.com/referral, and freemail.co.uk/referral.
4. Your Facebook/CPC campaigns fall into the Paid channel group by default, but you must separate them into a Paid Social group.
5. You want Google Analytics reports to be understandable to all employees and partners, even those who are not very familiar with the analytics system/

You can build a report on Google Analytics 4 data with your own channel grouping in Four ways:

1. Create a Custom Channel group in GA4
2. Use special Exploration Reports in Google Analytics 4.
3. Connect Google Analytics 4 data to Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) and set grouping conditions there.
4. Upload data from Google Analytics 4 to Google BigQuery and group channels there.

Let's take a closer look at each of the methods:

To set up a custom channel group, you begin by duplicating an existing group and making the necessary adjustments. If you haven't already established any groups, you can initiate the process by replicating the default group.

If you've previously created other groups, you can commence by copying either one of those or the default group, depending on your requirements.

Current dimensions available to Create Custom Channel Groups on GA4:

• Default Channel Groups
• Medium
• Source
• Source Platform
• Campaign ID
• Campaign Name

Let us walk you through an example of the process of creating a custom channel group for ‘Sunny Apparel's summer beachwear campaign, focusing on social media activities, particularly in the Malibu and Bali regions.

Navigate to the GA4 admin section and select Channel Groups to begin managing and customizing your traffic sources.

We recommend duplicating the existing group and making edits, as it's much easier unless you want something that requires detailed customization.

Enter the group name - e.g. ”Beachwear Promo Social Media”. This name should reflect the group's purpose, which in your case is tracking a specific promotional campaign.

Add a Description (Optional but recommended):

Include a brief description, such as "This channel group is designed to track and analyze the performance of Sunny Apparel's summer beachwear campaign on social media, with a focus on the Malibu and Bali regions." This helps in providing context for the group, especially when multiple custom groups are used.

Given below are some of the default channel descriptions already available:

Since we are focusing on social media activities, so we will keep the “paid social” channel. We have the liberty to remove the other channels from this group, as these aren't necessary to track for this scenario.

To create a new channel, you need to click on “Add new Channel.”

Then, you will need to add the channel name and additional details like source and medium.

Here's how you could rewrite the configuration for new regional channels focusing on Bali and Malibu for your Facebook Market Pages:

For Bali:

Channel name: Bali

The campaign name exactly matches (=) Summer Swim

The source exactly matches (=) facebook.com/Bali

For Malibu:

Channel name: Malibu

The campaign name exactly matches (=) Summer Swim

Source exactly matches (=) facebook.com/Malibu

This setup ensures that your GA4 tracking is specifically tailored to the Bali and Malibu regions, corresponding to your localized content on the respective Facebook Market Pages.

After adding these details, you can save the channel and proceed.

Click reorder and drag to reorder the list if you need to change the order of channels. Click Apply.

When you have all the channel definitions you need, and they're in the order you want, click Save group.

To analyze the performance of your "Beachwear Promo Social Media" campaign, particularly for the Malibu and Bali regions, you can use the following reports:

Acquisition > User Acquisition Report

• Select the "Beachwear Promo Social Media" channel group as the primary dimension.
• This report will show user acquisition metrics for the entire channel group.

Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition Report

• Similar to the User Acquisition Report, choose the "Beachwear Promo Social Media" channel group as the primary dimension.
• This report provides insights into traffic sources and user behavior within the group.

In Google Analytics 4, you can use Exploration Reports to group channels according to your conditions and view statistics. For example, you can group Facebook sources:

To do this, open the Explore section.

Select Free form:

Specify the settings for the report:

Where:

• 1 is the name of the report.
• 2 is the period for which you want to view statistics.
• 3 and 5 are parameters in the context of which you will view statistics. To group channels, use the Session source/medium parameter.
• 4 and 6 are metrics of interest.
• 7 is the filter by sources to be grouped. On the screen is an example for Facebook. Using the filter and its conditions, you can group any sources.

After completing these settings, you will get a table with statistics on grouped channels:

Another way to customize channel grouping is to connect Google Analytics 4 data to Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) with a built-in connector and set grouping conditions there. It won't be as reliable as Google BigQuery, but if you need a quick solution, you can use this implementation.

To connect data to a report, open Looker Studio and select Blank Report:

In the opened window, select the data source. In our case, it's Google Analytics 4:

Select a Google Analytics 4 account and resource to connect it to Looker Studio, and click the Add button:

Set grouping conditions:

Method 1: Use source field settings

Method 2: Open the list of report sources

Click Edit for the Google Analytics 4 source:

Add a new field:

Fill in the settings for the new channel grouping field. To do this, use the CASE WHEN formula (example for grouping Facebook sources):

1 – specify the field name

2 – fill in the grouping conditions

3 – click the Save button to save the new field

Example for grouping different channels:

Click Done and go to the report visualization settings using the new field:

It's not possible to edit historical data in Google Analytics. Therefore, if your UTM tags were configured incorrectly, and you sent traffic data to the wrong channel group in Google Analytics 4, you cannot fix this in the system interface.

Luckily, you can upload the required data to Google BigQuery and use SQL to correctly group channels, even for past traffic.

Channel grouping in Google Analytics 4 offers valuable insights but poses challenges like complex setup, data discrepancies, and ongoing maintenance, making it crucial to approach with care.

Customizing channels in Google Analytics 4 requires a solid grasp of its rule-based system, making the process complex and time-consuming, especially for those new to GA4. Precise setup is essential to ensure accurate channel groupings.

Misconfigured or overlapping rules can cause mismatches between expected and reported traffic, leading to inaccurate data and skewed insights. Ensuring accuracy demands careful rule management.

Regular updates to channel groupings are necessary to reflect changing marketing strategies. This maintenance can be resource-intensive, requiring ongoing monitoring and adjustments to keep the analysis relevant.

Custom channel groupings only apply to data from the point of setup onward, complicating historical comparisons. This limitation makes it difficult to accurately assess trends over time.

Aligning GA4 channel groupings with other analytics platforms can be challenging due to differences in how traffic is categorized. This can lead to inconsistencies and complicate cross-platform analysis.

GA4’s segmentation capabilities may have constraints, limiting how finely traffic can be segmented within channel groupings. This can hinder the ability to conduct detailed, granular analysis.

Another advantage of grouping channels in Google BigQuery is the ability to automate the process and significantly save analysts' time on preparing reports. OWOX BI will help you with this.

To build reports, data from different sources must be correctly processed and combined. Data preparation is a process. It's not enough to prepare a report (or even many). Data must be updated regularly, and changes to reports must be made permanently. All this is now done by the hands of analysts, which takes a long time and requires the help of SQL queries and scripts.

If you build reports on raw, non-business-ready data, you may encounter many recurring problems: finding errors and causes of discrepancies will take a lot of time, and the channel grouping logic must be constantly duplicated in all SQL queries.

If you decide to change the logic — for example, move one channel to another group — then all requests will need to be redone. With data transformation and modeling, this task is solved before a report is built.

OWOX BI collects raw data and automatically converts it to the format you need according to your company's data model. Due to seamless data collection and preparation, you don't have the risk of human errors and poor execution quality. Moreover, you have full control over the whole data flow and can see any errors as they appear.

Automated no-code SQL-based transformation templates and UI scheduling empower your teams to transform data. No engineering skills or complex tools are required.

If you need to change the grouping of channels, for example, it's enough to change the grouping once at the model level, and it will be applied to all reports. You don't need to change everything and then look for discrepancies manually.

In addition, OWOX BI accurately collects traffic sources for each user visit and not just for the first visit, as Google Analytics 4 does. This will give you the flexibility to define conversion sources and channel scoring.

Currently, Google offers only a manual way to import ad cost data into Google Analytics 4. You can automate this process and save valuable time using the solution from OWOX BI.

If you plan to import advertising costs to Google Analytics 4, you need to add the required parameter.

You can build a report on Google Analytics 4 data with your own channel grouping in several ways:

• Build a custom channel group in Google Analytics 4
• Use special Exploration Reports in Google Analytics 4.
• Connect Google Analytics 4 data to Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) and set grouping conditions there.
• Upload data from Google Analytics 4 to Google BigQuery and group channels using SQL.
• Use OWOX BI Transformation.

The first few methods involve the manual work of analysts, which must be repeated every time a new report is needed. To automate the process and save time, you can create a data model using OWOX BI Transformation. Use prebuilt SQL transformations (or create your own) to make raw data business-ready and get insights faster.