Reporting is about whether GA4 is organised to answer the questions you get asked. Clean, correctly counted data can still mislead: channel reports if paid campaigns aren't tagged, page reports if every URL is listed individually.
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Unassigned traffic breakdown
An annotated Traffic Acquisition report showing Unassigned at 14% of sessions, with callouts on campaigns missing UTM parameters, email rows where medium is blank, and a paid social row whose unrecognised medium maps to no standard channel group.
| Check | What to look for | Pass condition | Fix if failing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unassigned traffic | What percentage of sessions land in the "Unassigned" channel? | Under 5% of total sessions | Add UTMs to untagged paid campaigns; check for unusual medium values |
| Brand vs non-brand split | Is branded organic search separated from non-brand? | A custom channel group or report filter exists to isolate brand-name queries | Create a custom channel group with a brand keyword rule, or use Search Console to separate query types |
| UTM consistency | Are source and medium values consistent across campaigns? (google vs Google, cpc vs paid-search) | Each channel has one consistent source/medium pair; no variants | Enforce a UTM naming convention; audit the Source / Medium report for variants |
| Content grouping | Are page paths grouped into meaningful sections (Blog, Pricing, Product, Checkout)? | Content groups configured; reports show sections, not just raw URLs | Set up content grouping via GTM or in-page parameter; register as a custom dimension |
| Sampling and thresholds | Do Explorations show a sampling indicator? | No sampling on the reports you rely on for decisions | Narrow date ranges; use standard reports (not Explorations) for headline numbers; consider GA4 360 if sampling persists |
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Channel grouping configuration
A custom channel group rule isolating Paid Search (medium exactly matches cpc) and Brand Organic (medium = organic AND source contains brand name). A mapping table shows raw source/medium pairs (google / cpc, bing / cpc, google / organic with brand query) mapped to clean channel names (Paid Search, Brand Organic), against the default grouping.