How to fix the Unassigned issue in the Traffic Acquisition report #DATA_SHORTS
One of the common questions in Google Analytics 4 is how to fix the “Unassigned” that appears in the Traffic Acquisition report:
Many think that it’s just another missing data that wasn’t captured by Google Analytics 4, like “not set” or “not provided”, but that’s not the case.
Table of Contents
The truth about Unassigned
The reason for this Unassigned is much more simple – the default dimension that appears when you open the Traffic Acquisition report is called “Session primary channel group.
This is not a Session source / medium dimension, but rather a grouping of several traffic sources.
In this link, you can see how Google decides which traffic source will be included in which group.
Therefore, if you are using UTM parameters that do not meet one of the predefined criteria, it’s likely that it will fall under the Unassigned channel.
Problem solved.
How can I know what's the real source of this Unassigned Traffic?
Unfortunately, there is no way to change the default channel group settings, but there are other solutions:
- To quickly view historical data, you can filter by “Unassigned” at the top of the report, and then add a secondary dimension of “Session source / medium”.
- Another option is to change the primary dimension from “channel group” to “Session source / medium”:
- If you want “Session source / medium” to consistently appear instead of the default channel group, you can use the report editing function, and set another dimension as default:
- The last option is of course to create your own channel group:
Then you can change the grouping rules so that traffic sources that currently fall under Unassigned will be assigned to the appropriate grouping:
That’s it. Enjoy!
