How to Create Custom Channel Groups in GA4

Creating Custom Channel Groups in GA4:

Creating custom channel groups in GA4 can provide several benefits, including:

1. Better Understanding of Traffic Sources:

By creating custom channel groups, you can group together different sources of traffic based on your business goals and marketing strategy. This will give you a more accurate picture of where your website traffic is coming from and which channels are driving the most conversions.

2. Improved Campaign Performance Tracking:

They allow you to track the performance of specific marketing campaigns more effectively. You can group together all the traffic from a particular campaign, ( e.g. pay per click) which will give you more detailed insights into how well that campaign is performing.

3. Enhanced Reporting:

Custom channel groups can help you to create more meaningful and insightful reports. You can easily filter your reports by custom channel group to get a more detailed view of your website’s performance.

4. More Accurate Attribution:

Custom channel groups can help you to accurately attribute website conversions to the appropriate marketing channels. This can help you to make more informed decisions about where to invest your marketing budget and resources to optimise your conversion rate.

5. Customization and Flexibility:

It gives you the flexibility to define channels that are unique to your business. This means that you can create channel groups that are tailored to your specific business needs, which can help you to get a more accurate view of your website’s performance.

Watch this video or following the instructions below to create a new custom channel group in GA4.

Creating A New Channel Group:

1. Open the Channel Groups section.
2. Click on “Create new channel group”.
3. Choose to copy the default group to create a new group.
4. Enter a name and description for the new group.
5. Edit the channels by adding new ones, removing existing ones, or modifying their definitions.
6. Reorder the channels if necessary.
7. Click “Apply” and then “Save group” when you’re done.

Remember that traffic will be included in the first channel whose definition it matches, based on the order of channels in the group. For more details of custom channel groups in GA4, check out Google’s documentation.

Currently, GA4 does no allow you to add your new custom channel groups to the pre-defined reports in the console. You will need to add it as a dimension to a custom report in the Explore section of the console. Hopefully this will change in time.