Channel grouping is the rule by which individual visits are assigned to groups such as organic search, paid advertising, social media, email or direct traffic. The default groupings cannot handle everything, so some visits end up in the unassigned group or are assigned incorrectly – typically links from emails without campaign tagging, or click-throughs from assistants that appear as direct traffic. The solution has two steps. Consistently tag all links from campaigns using a uniform convention that the whole team follows, including external partners. And create your own channel groups for sources you want to track separately. Without this, you are comparing groups whose content changes over time. Document the grouping rules together with the date of the change, otherwise year-on-year comparison becomes unusable.
See also: Traffic from AI tools, Data quality in analytics, Measurement plan.
