Channel Groupings

The next stage involves updating the default channel groupings if you wish.

This is done using a case statement. If you are unsure what case statements are you can read all about them in this section.

Where is this in the Pipeline Interface?

channel_groupings_nav

What are you setting up here?

This page allows you to customise an extra channel grouping using a case statement.

How does this work?

Channel groupings are created by taking by looking at traffic source fields and applying a set of rules.

This categorisation is based on the:

  • Source
  • Medium
  • Campaign
  • Source Category

Our default channel grouping attempts to mimic the default channel grouping in the GA4 interface. (So your numbers match the GA4 interface.)

Our extra channel grouping is an improved version of this. The default channel grouping makes some strange decisions/has some issues and so we have an improved version.

Once you're comfortable that your data is correct, we strongly recommend altering our extra traffic grouping for your website and using that.

How can I alter the extra channel grouping?

On the channel grouping config you'll be able to see our current rules.

channel_groupings_screenshot_1

We use a case statement to categorise traffic.

You might recognise these from Looker Studio or perhaps you already know what one is.

If you've never seen one before we have a starter guide on case statements here.

Let’s go through some examples of how to adjust it.

Example 1: Adding tiktok to organic social

Let’s adjust the Organic Social categorisation to match more specific sources.

The current conditions are as follows:

How can we add tiktok to this? We can change the first line in this case.

It’s using regexp_contains to match source against a list of values.

You don’t need to know exactly what this does, you just need to extend the pattern.

We can adjust as follows:

Remember you can always reach out to support if you're struggling to update this.

Why would I want to use the extra channel grouping?

GA4 (and Pipeline) use rules in order to categorise traffic into different default channel groupings.

These groupings, though, can be misleading or sometimes, just wrong.

Example: in GA4 traffic coming from gmail is classified as “Organic Search.” 🤷‍♂️

Broadly speaking, we think we have some more sensible defaults.

Should you personalise ours/the default channel grouping?

In general, we would say yes.

You know your traffic much better the Engineers at Google who have needed to make channel grouping which are generic for everyone.

We've tried to improve the default channel grouping, but it's still unlikely to perfectly match your unique traffic.

With the GA4 categorisation, many cases:

  • The domain classification is wrong.
  • Extra channel grouping could improve how your traffic is categorised (i.e a Default Channel for AI).
  • You can categorise more specifically your referral traffic.

Yes above, though do customise it.

How does Google's default channel grouping work?

Pretty much exactly as we've described above and you can see in the case statement.

It runs through a series of rules to categorise traffic.

  • The first one which matches will be used.
  • The rules are largely based on the medium & source.

For example in order for traffic to be grouped as Organic Social it needs to be:

  • Medium is one of (“social”, “social-network”, “social-media”, “sm”, “social network”, “social media”) OR
  • The source matches a defined list of sites such as facebook.com etc.

The full list of rules is based on the rules found in this Google Documentation

Channel Grouping FAQs