Custom Channel Grouping is a nice way to test many different hypotheses in Google Analytics. It can further also be used to optimize the spend on branded and non-branded campaigns on the search as well as on the social network. This guide will offer you a step by step guide on creating custom channel grouping in Google analytics and analyzing your data.
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Custom Channel Grouping in Google Analytics
Although Brand terms options in the Google Analytics admin panel are for defining the paid search query types. We will start with the brand terms and later, show you how to add other channels.
Manage Brand Terms
- Go to Admin
- Under views, go to channel settings
- Under channelĀ settings, click on Manager Brand Terms
- Enter the different variations of your brand including acronyms, shortcuts, other names, misspellings. You can get more of such data from the search console and search terms from Google ads.
Before we move forward, here is a look at the current google analytics of my website. In the referral traffic, it shows a lot of search engines names and social media channel names as well. You can see your google analytics account and find the same anomalies. So, I am going to fix them now.
Create New Custom Channel Grouping in Google Analytics
- Go to the Google Analytics Admin setting
- Under Channel settings, click on Channel grouping
- Click on new channel grouping in the right pane.
- It will open a default Channel grouping by Google Analytics.
- Name the Channel group as shown below.
As shown above, you can see two types of channel definitions.
- System-defined and,
- User-defined
System-defined channel definition utilizes the Google Analytics channel grouping settings. User-defined is defined by the user, as the name suggests. You can already see some channel already defined. But we will start afresh.
Custom Organic Channel
Branded Organic Search traffic
As discussed before, here is how to define branded organic traffic. Most or all of the branded traffic land on the home page. So in this case, I have used system defined organic channel with an “AND” rule of session landing on the home page.
General Organic search
Most or all of the non-branded traffic land to pages except the home page. So in this case, I have used system defined organic channel with an “AND” rule of the session not landing on the home page. I also recognized that sometimes google analytics will count the traffic from the other search engines as the referral traffic so I fixed that too.
Google analytics evaluates all the custom channel rules in order. Since we have already defined branded search traffic for the sessions landing on the homepage, so the rest of the system defined organic channel will be counted as generic organic search traffic.
You just have to go to the referral traffic acquisition channel in the google analytics and look for all the search engines and put those search engines names in the source with the regex match as shown above. And, you are good to go.
Custom Social Traffic Channel
I encountered the same problem as above for the social channel as well. Many of the social channels were coming in social referrals. So, I decided to group them into one channel as a social channel.
All Social Channels grouped in one
If you want the Paid and organic custom channel for all the social platforms separately, here are some examples:
Organic Facebook custom Channel
There are several referral sources that Google analytics shows for organic Facebook traffic. So, I bundled them using “OR” condition to define organic Facebook traffic. Please mind that if you are running Facebook ads then you should use Facebook custom parameter and define medium as CPC or something so that all traffic does not go under organic.
Paid Facebook Custom Channel
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, we are using custom parameter data from Facebook where we defined source/medium in our Facebook ads final URL.
Possible Problems: Paid Facebook & Instagram Traffic going under Paid Search Generic Channel
Below is a screenshot where you can see that Google Analytics is showing Paid Facebook and Instagram traffic under the paid search channel. Why?
Google Analytics Custom channels are designed to handle only the Paid traffic originating from Google sources. So wherever it sees medium as CPC, it will try to assign that traffic under paid search which is a wrong practice. In order to avoid it, place all the social media custom channel rules above the paid search and paid display traffic and it will work fine then.
Custom Channel: Paid Search
Here we shall be using the brand terms already defined in the GA admin panel to segregate the branded paid search traffic and non-branded paid search traffic.
Branded Paid Search Custom Channel
Generic Paid Search Channel
Unknown Paid Search custom Channel
This channel contains paid search traffic for which there is no query or keyword to classify, e.g., (not set) queries.
Group Other referral traffic in GA logically
Besides branded traffic, you should also group other traffic logically in different channels. Most of that traffic will be coming under the referral channel under Acquisition. Here is how my referral traffic looks:
My referral traffic is from different sources such as
- AMP CDN for my AMP pages
- double click network for the Google matched contentĀ ads at the bottom of an article
- Wikipedia
- m.facebook.com which should ideally go to the social network
- google.co.in which should ideally go to the organic channel
Looking at the above referral traffic data, I can see that my Google Analytics data is a little bit skewed. So, I should create different channels logically as per my convenience.
Google Matched Content Channel
Based on the Source / Medium data from the referral traffic, here is how I created google matched content channel.
AMP Traffic Channel
AddThis traffic channel
In this case, AddThis traffic is not directly recognized by Google Analytics as referral traffic. We have to set that up. I have written a separate blog on that. It is using GA settings variable in GTM for customized traffic source and medium.
Finally, I can see in my google accounts that all the channels that I set up to filter out the traffic data via channel grouping in google analytics are being reflected properly. Have a look below:
UTM based channel
If you are running some campaign and you want to capture the campaign traffic on a different channel. Then, here is how you do it.
- Use UTM codes to tag the traffic. Here is the link to campaign URL builder
- Just like we did for AMP traffic or AddThis traffic above, you can use the source and medium field to define your channel. You can set and get the UTM source and medium from the campaign URL builder link given above.
- Further, you can also use UTM for retargeting traffic from different sources on different channels.
If you have set up the channel grouping properly, you can also access them by going into channels and then selecting your new channel grouping name under the primary dimension as shown above.