Beyond the Defaults: Harnessing the Power of Custom Channel Groupings in GA4

In the realm of digital analytics, businesses are constantly seeking ways to extract meaningful insights from the vast sea of data generated by online activities. One of the ways Google Analytics 4 (GA4) helps organizations make data more relevant is via a feature known as Custom Channel Groupings. These Custom Channel Groupings (CCGs) offer a tailored approach to refining data analysis, without requiring any changes to the technical implementation of the platform. In this article, we’ll explore the tangible benefits of utilizing CCGs in GA4, drawing comparisons with their predecessors in Universal Analytics, and providing practical examples where they prove more advantageous than Default Channel Groupings.

Why Customize Your Channel Groupings?

In GA4, just like Universal Analytics, there are two types of Channel Groupings. First, you have Default Channel Groupings (DCGs). These are pre-defined rules that “bucket” traffic sources into 18 possible categories for analysis. Unlike in UA, however, in GA4 these rules are not editable in any way. That’s where CCGs come in.

CCGs are, as the name suggests, a customizable set of rules that can be configured as needed to match your unique business needs. If you find that your traffic is being misattributed to the wrong GA4 Default Channel, and/or there is a lot of traffic falling under “Unassigned,” one option you could pursue is to adjust your tagging/UTMs to alter the data coming into GA4 to match Google’s pre-defined rules. However, often a simpler approach is to implement CCGs that match the data coming into the platform as-is.

Benefits of Custom Channel Groupings in GA4

The most obvious advantage of Custom Channel Groupings is the ability to tailor your insights to “speak your organization’s language.” Unlike CCGs that offer generic categories like “Organic Search” and “Direct,” custom setups allow businesses to define rules based on their unique marketing strategies. However, there are some other major benefits that are worth understanding in detail.

Granular Analysis

CCGs empower businesses to understand marketing channel-level data on their own terms. While CCGs provide a high-level overview, custom setups allow organizations to report on channels the way that they think about channels.  For example, oftentimes a ‘Paid Search’ channel proves to be too broad to be helpful for providing insights to a SEM marketer looking to make optimizations based on on-site performance. With CCGs, that category can be further refined to create subgroupings of traffic from different search engines, campaigns, or to differentiate ‘Branded’ keywords from ‘Unbranded.’

Refined Attribution Modeling

CCGs play a pivotal role in helping organizations get more customized attribution modeling from GA4. In a world where multi-touch attribution is being eroded by cookie deprecation and other, related changes, CCGs at least make the insights provided by attribution modeling clearer and more actionable. This refinement is crucial for efficiently allocating marketing budgets across channels.

Clearer ROI Measurement

For businesses running diverse marketing campaigns across various channels, precise measurement of return on investment (ROI) is essential. CCGs enable a clearer assessment of campaign performance. For instance, if you’re running campaigns across social media, email, search, and display, creating CCGs allows you to more easily evaluate the ROI of these campaigns across channels.

Example Use Cases

Tracking the Impact of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has become a staple in many digital strategies. With CCGs, businesses can create groupings specifically tailored to track traffic generated by influencers. This allows for a detailed analysis of how influencer collaborations contribute to overall conversions, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of this marketing approach.

Segmenting Email Campaign Data

Email marketing remains a robust channel for engaging with your audience. While CCGs might group all email traffic together, CCGs allow you to differentiate between various email campaigns. For instance, you can create custom groups for newsletters, promotional emails, and transactional emails, providing insights into the unique impact of each type of email campaign.

Evaluating Offline Marketing Impact

Businesses engaging in offline marketing efforts might find GA4’s CCGs insufficient. CCGs can be used to create a specialized category for measuring offline sources, allowing businesses to measure the online impact of their offline campaigns.

Notable Differences from Universal Analytics

Many readers will remember CCGs from Universal Analytics, but it would be a mistake to assume that CCGs in GA4 work exactly as they did in UA. There are several interesting differences to be aware of.

Firstly, CCGs in UA had some limitations in terms of their usability. For example, CCGs in UA couldn’t be used in custom reports. In contrast, GA4 provides CCGs the same usability as CCGs, allowing them to be applied in any report or Exploration.

In addition, GA4 introduces event-based groupings, allowing businesses to categorize traffic based on conversion events. This is a notable departure from UA, where custom groupings were based on sessions only. The shift to event-based groupings in GA4 accommodates the evolving measurement landscape, offering businesses the flexibility to categorize traffic based on user interactions such as video views, form submissions, or specific on-page actions.

Lastly, GA4 adopts a user-centric model, emphasizing the importance of understanding user behavior across multiple devices and sessions. This represents a departure from the session-centric tracking in UA. CCGs in GA4 allow for a user-centric approach, providing more accurate insights into the complete customer journey via ‘First User Custom Channel Groupings’ allowing marketers to understand by what channel the user was first acquired. This evolution reflects the reality of users interacting with brands through various touchpoints over time and a need from marketers to understand what initially drove the user to their site/app.

Conclusion

GA4 can be an immensely powerful tool for measuring your web properties’ performance holistically, but in order to accomplish that task it needs to be set up for success. The insights generated from GA4 can only be useful if they come in a form that is actionable to your organization. Implementing CCGs lets you tailor the insights generated in GA4 to your specific business objectives, enables more granular analysis, and refines how you handle attribution across marketing channels. There’s no downside to setting up these custom groups — you’ve always got GA4’s default groupings to fall back on, as needed — so we recommend that every organization running multichannel marketing campaigns take the time to set up CCGs in GA4.