What Are Custom Channel Groupings?
Custom channel groupings are Google’s attempt to consolidate your various utm_source’s and utm_medium’s into groupings that make a bit more sense. This allows you to view your channel performance in a much more consolidated way.
Universal Analytics allowed you to group your traffic into different sections that aligned with your marketing efforts. The general goal was you wanted to segment out any groups were too big (Ex. Branded vs Non-Branded traffic, influencer vs organic referrals, etc…), or to provide groupings for your custom marketing (Ex. DSP’s, Email blasts, etc…). This feature was not available in Google Analytics 4 until March 2023, where it required you to rely on Google’s default groupings.
How to Setup your Custom Channel Grouping
If you are new to GA4, you probably haven’t setup your Custom Channel Grouping. In order to do so, I have built a tool that will pull in the last 90 days of your data and allow you to easily begin categorization.
Steps:
- Copy the Sheet to your account with access to the GA4 Account you would like to audit
- Add your GA4 Property Id to Account Info, Cell B2
- This can be found under Admin > Property Settings > Property ID
- Paste this code into the sheet
- Access the script under Extensions > App Scripts
- Run the Script
- You will probably need to accept some access from Google. This script is will pull a report of your last 90 days segmenting your sessions by Source, Medium and Campaign.
- In “Working Sheet”, you will find a list of sources, mediums & campaign in columns H to K. By putting information in columns A to C, you can build rules to filter these combinations to channel groupings.
- After you have removed a majority of your un-categorized channels, “Final Data To Input” sheet will assist you in building the channels in Google Analytics. Navigate to Google Analytics 4’s Admin panel, click into Data Settings and Channel Groups. You simply need to create a new channel group and you add in your changes.
- After making the channel group, you can navigate to your reports in Google Analytics 4 and update your default dimension to use your new channel Grouping. Simply click the Pencil in the top right, click into Dimensions, and set your new channel grouping as the default.