What is Not Considered a Default Medium in Google Analytics?

Your Google Analytics account is a goldmine of data about your website traffic until you see a significant portion of it lumped into categories like 'Direct', 'Referral', or '(not set)'. While GA does a fantastic job categorizing common traffic types on its own, it can't read your mind, especially when you start marketing across different social platforms, email campaigns, or even on a physical flyer. Any traffic source whose specific medium isn't predefined in Google's rulebook simply doesn't get categorized correctly - and that's a problem for anyone trying to measure marketing ROI.

This article will explain which common marketing activities Google Analytics doesn't classify by default and, more importantly, walk you through the simple, effective way to fix messy data and gain crystal-clear insights into what’s actually working.

First, A Quick Look at Google's Default Mediums

To understand what Google Analytics misses, we first need to understand what it catches by default. Every visitor who comes to your site has a source (where they came from, like google.com or facebook.com) and a medium (how they got there). Google uses this medium to sort traffic into overarching 'Default Channel Groupings'. This automation is helpful, but it only works if your traffic follows a very specific set of rules. Here is the core of it all:

• Organic: The most common and most widely understood of mediums. Visitors from organic sources are users that clicked on your website from unpaid rankings on any of the search engine result pages. GA usually recognizes this source as "google" or "bing".
• CPC: It stands for cost-per-click. It means visitors who arrived at your site from clicking on paid ads. One example would be a source/medium combination such as 'google / cpc'. Proper categorization of this traffic depends on tagging, as we will later learn in the article.
• Referral: Referral traffic means all the website hits that arrived via a hyperlink from another site. Any traffic from sources such as news outlets or blog sites that linked to a page on your site falls into this category. Think of your source being a friend referring your business to someone else.
• (none): This means visitors who, for whatever reason, came directly to your site. Most examples of (none) in GA would be users typing your URL or visiting via saved bookmarks in their browser.
• Email: Contrary to what you might think, 'email' is not self-evident in GA's medium categorization. Its accurate categorization depends on other rules, which we are covering further in this article.

These are the main and default values assigned to the Session medium dimension on Google Analytics 4. Any marketing campaign or website visit that doesn't follow this specific set of rules will fall through the GA cracks, ultimately impacting your marketing analysis and campaign strategy.

Common Marketing Traffic Google Analytics Will Incorrectly Measure

Now let's move from those default and known scenarios to some unknown mediums that can complicate your campaign measurement.

Both Organic and Paid Campaigns on Popular Social Channels

This is probably the biggest offender in today's marketing landscape. Running ad or organic campaigns on social media platforms, without proper measurement in place, could become one of your biggest wastes of resources without knowing it until it's too late. Here's why: all your clicks from platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, or X posts without specific parameters, will only show up on your Google Analytics reports as 'Referral' traffic. Without the required parameters, social media platforms are merely external sites referring traffic to yours.

You may have spent time and effort building a GA4 dashboard, showing which platform generated the highest ROI possible for your client. How would you feel at the end of the day discovering that the valuable social data was unavailable to you at that time? It's a disaster scenario. Proper marketing source recognition in GA is essential and has direct implications on your entire marketing strategy plans.

Email Marketing Traffic

Email is a classic channel, but it’s notorious for misattribution in Google Analytics. Remember when we mentioned earlier that 'email' has more to do with it than meets the eye? This is the core of our premise. When someone clicks a link in your latest email newsletter and arrives at your website, that doesn't necessarily mean the marketing medium will be registered on your GA as an 'email'. Instead, without more context, it will show as:

• (none) traffic: Users coming from desktop email client apps, such as Outlook, could be listed as (none). This is because the referral or "how that user got there" is not transmitted from these apps to your final destination website, resulting in distorted and inconsistent data for your campaign.
• Referral traffic: On the other hand, users opening the same newsletter in a browser-based platform like Gmail will be shown with a medium of 'referral'.

You might think you're being productive by sending out a well-written newsletter with links that could boost company sales. In reality, as seen from this email marketing misattribution issue, your hard-earned marketing efforts end up overlooked due to the lack of a simple term. It's unfair for any professional data analyst dealing with this mess.

QR Codes Campaigns

Not everything is digital. In the big marketing scheme, you also have QR code campaigns on physical flyers. A classic case of “dark traffic". Google Analytics isn't able to magically determine where the scanned and resulting browser request comes from, or who scanned it. Consequently, the analytical engine will categorize this traffic as a totally unknown source. Once again, all your efforts and campaign hard work end up categorized as (none).

Special Cases of Referrals and Affiliate Partners

What do you do with specific partner traffic links? Are you going to keep them under the "referral" category in Google Analytics and lose a big chunk of your campaign data results? Or is there a way to make GA recognize this distinct traffic? As we will cover later in this article, with GA, it's all about rules. There are indeed ways to not only light up this custom traffic source but also build your own unique, customizable analytics reports. Just follow GA's specific set of rules.

PDF and Other Downloadable Formats

Yes, sometimes people will click on a company website listed in the PDF file's company profile section. It sounds like a perfect scenario for GA to recognize and register the traffic origin. However, GA instead sees this type of visit as another random user and once again categorizes it under the infamous (none) traffic type.

Fixing Misattribution Problems by Becoming a Campaign URL Tagging Expert

You've read about these scenarios and understood which cases may bring incorrect assumptions in your GA reports. Now, you need to know how to fix it effectively. This section provides practical examples of how to correctly tag your traffic by adding specific query parameter values on all links sending traffic to your GA property. This is commonly known as 'UTM campaign tagging'. We've got hope coming up to save our reports!

Understanding the Basics of UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) Parameter Tags

Think of a very detailed map coordinate versus asking Siri how to get there. By using a very granular location format as an input parameter, you're always guaranteed to get a definite destination. On the other hand, using a random voice query to a virtual assistant without the proper contextual data will bring less accurate data. This is the basic premise of using well-tagged UTM URLs. They provide more context, more precise answers, and ensure clarity when analyzing data.

There are five specific parameter keys to consider:

• 'utm_source': Denotes the source of your traffic.
• 'utm_medium': Specifies your traffic medium.
• 'utm_campaign': Names this custom traffic campaign in your GA charts.

These three are required by GA and work great in combination. Additionally, there are two optional parameters:

• Term (utm_term): Used to specify a keyword for this traffic.
• Content (utm_content): Useful for distinguishing between similar content or A/B testing ads, making it valuable for finding your best audience fit.

Once you've understood the available parameters, creating your first tagged URL becomes a straightforward process. For example, consider the URL below:

https://myblogurl.com?utm_source=spring_edition&utm_medium=emailnewsletter&utm_campaign=20pctOFF

This well-crafted UTM-tagged URL is self-explanatory. You can infer it is an email marketing campaign stemming from a newsletter, likely providing a 20% discount for loyal email followers on the latest spring collection. Your GA can see this too, even with fewer words, reaching a similar, positive conclusion. For a brief moment, envision a GA report showcasing this specific data exclusively as "email newsletter / spring edition" and the recent sales increase it brought. The satisfaction of something well-measured should be immense at this point.

Customizing Your Channel Group on GA4: Tailoring Your Marketing Data Story

Once you've mastered tagging your campaign and all URLs, you can take your GA skills to the next level: customizing your traffic channel group types. Suppose you don't like the term 'Referral' for referral traffic and want to use 'MyVeryOwnPartnerProgram122'. GA allows this through a customizable way. Ensure consistency in your tagging, and you can start using your customized traffic grouping in all reports. These custom setups will better support your campaign results later when shared with managers, team members, or clients. Just remember, administering these changes in GA4 requires an Admin role.

Navigate to 'Admin' in your GA4 account and explore the section called 'Data Sets' to locate 'Channel Groups'. Once there, you can create any new traffic groups you like using your preferred source and medium names, as well as campaign names. This customization encourages creativity, like naming them according to your campaign goals. For example, imagine creating an 'eBook Download' traffic rule to measure user engagement from that channel, with a secondary goal of lead generation to list newsletter events. Such simple data provides significant insights and potential wins for your marketing campaigns.

Final Thoughts

While Google Analytics is a powerful tool, its ability to recognize different types of medium data sources depends on following established tagging and naming conventions. Therefore, it's not a comprehensive solution for measuring all your marketing campaign efforts right out of the box. The many 'unknowns' can render your GA metrics messy and inconsistent, risking turning some users away from analytics roles entirely due to the complexity of data sources. But don't panic just yet. We've shared practical examples on how to understand them, and overcome issues using simple, well-crafted URL campaigns for future marketing efforts.

Tracking the nuances between dozens of campaigns and platforms can become overwhelming. However, this is where powerful tools come to the rescue. At Graphed, we specialize in cutting through complexity. We effortlessly connect to Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, HubSpot, and other platforms, to build custom dashboard experiences specific to your needs. Using simple queries is as easy as asking, for example, "How are ebook downloads performing in the last 30 days?" gaining instant insights or continuing to explore further questions. Our tools streamline complex analytics tasks, leaving you to focus on what matters: becoming a successful data analyst.