Hi Eric, I assume the campaign parameters all persist on the landing page as the campaign is properly tracked? Haven’t heard this before and it should be tracked under Organic Social:

Source matches a regex list of social sites
OR
Medium is one of (“social”, “social-network”, “social-media”, “sm”, “social network”, “social media”)

Are you a member of measure.slack? It would be good to ask it there as someone might have experienced a similar issue.

I am having an issue. When I add the following parameters: “?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=test” I am only seeing campaign properly reported on. GA4 is not seeing the source or medium correctly. And then the default channel grouping is unassigned. Any ideas?
Thanks so much!

Hi Kelsie,

‘Manual’ traffic will be recognized as Display if you use one of these values as utm_medium: display, banner, expandable, interstitial, cpm.

Hi Agnieszka,

Thanks for the heads up! Unfortunately, the GA4 UI sometimes doesn’t provide you with the correct numbers (especially when adding secondary dimensions).
Did you also try to match it against a report in Explore and/or a data extraction to Google Sheets? Personally, I often use Explore or automate my queries via Supermetrics.

Great article! I was wondering if you QA’ed the data against GA4 UI? I tried to run the query and I can’t get the Direct channel to match – it’s more than double when using BQ! Would you know why that might be the case?

Thanks

Hi John,

There have been some recent changes. This is what is currently available:

User acquisition: First user default channel grouping
The channel by which the user was first acquired.

Traffic acquisition: Session default channel grouping
The channels that that referred the user’s session.

Default channel grouping
Relates to attribution reporting (based on attribution model).

So I believe there are three different dimensions relating to Default Channel Grouping currently.

Best,
Paul

Hi Sean,

In the GA4 UI you can get Social/Paid Social right by following these definitions:

Organic Social
Medium is one of (“social”, “social-network”, “social-media”, “sm”, “social network”, “social media”)

Paid Social
Source matches a list of social sites // spreadsheet at the bottom of the article

AND

Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|paid.*)$

Further, you have full flexibility in setting up your own custom groupings via BigQuery and/or spreadsheets (i.e. via Supermetrics in Google Spreadsheets).

Best,
Paul

i’m trying to figure out how to use the ga4 data api to aggregate the social source reporting together, all the facebooks, all the twitters, all the instagrams. i’m sure it can be done, i just haven’t found the right magic to make it happen yet.