What is GA4 Custom Channel Group?

Understanding how visitors reach your website is crucial for measuring the success of your marketing strategies. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) provides the Channel Grouping feature to analyze traffic sources. With channel grouping, you can categorize visitor traffic into specific segments and make more informed marketing decisions.

What is Channel Grouping in GA4?

GA4’s channel grouping system categorizes traffic into predefined groups such as Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, and Social Media. This allows you to:

Interpret traffic sources more effectively,
Measure campaign performance,
Optimize your marketing investments.

However, default groupings may not always meet your needs. This is where Custom Channel Groups come into play.

What are Custom Channel Groups?

Custom Channel Groups allow you to categorize website traffic based on your own rules, enabling you to go beyond default groupings and conduct more tailored analyses.

For example, you can group users coming from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Criteo, or RTB House under a single custom channel and analyze their performance in greater detail.

Where Can You Use Custom Channel Groups?

You can utilize custom channel groups in various GA4 reports:

Acquisition Reports: Analyze user acquisition based on your custom channels.
Traffic Acquisition Reports: Gain deeper insights into traffic sources within your custom channel groups.
Custom Explorations: Build tailored reports using custom channel groups.
Audience Building: Create audiences based on traffic from specific custom channel groups.

Advantages of Using Custom Channel Groups

In-depth Analysis: Gain a more detailed understanding of your marketing campaign performance.

Campaign Tracking: Manage and evaluate traffic sources more efficiently by grouping them under specific channels.

Competitive Analysis: Compare traffic from different channels for better insights.

Enhanced Reporting: Focus on the most important channels by customizing your reports.

Conclusion

Channel grouping in GA4 is one of the most effective ways to analyze traffic sources and improve your marketing strategy. While default channel groups provide a general traffic analysis, Custom Channel Groups allow you to gain more detailed insights tailored to your business needs.

By leveraging these features, you can maximize the efficiency of your marketing investments and enhance campaign performance.

How to Create Custom Channel Groups in GA4?

Step 1:

Step 2:

You will see your existing channel groups in this section. Click on “Create new channel group”.

Step 3:

In this step, we will configure our new channel group to separately categorize traffic from Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads.

Name the new channel group “New Channel Group”.

Click on “Add New Channel” to create a new channel.

Step 4:

For the new channel, name it “Instagram Ads“.
Set the following conditions under Channel Conditions:

Traffic Source → Source → Contains → Instagram
Traffic Medium → Medium → Contains → Paid

Step 5:

Repeat the same steps for “Facebook Ads” with the following conditions:

Traffic Source → Source → Contains → Facebook
Traffic Medium → Medium → Contains → Paid

Step 6:

To reorder the channels, click on “Reorder” and move the newly created channels above the Paid Social channel. This ensures that GA4 prioritizes traffic from Instagram and Facebook according to our grouping preferences. Click “Apply” to finalize the changes.

Step 7:

Click on “Save Group” to save all the modifications.

Step 8:

Set the newly created “New Channel Group” as the Primary Channel Group.

As a result, we will now be able to track Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads separately in our GA4 reports, gaining better insights into paid social ad performance.

Using Custom Channel Groups in Reports

If the custom channel group is not set as the primary, you need to manually select it as a dimension in the Traffic Acquisition Report. However, since we set it as primary, it will automatically appear as the default “New Channel Group” in reports.