Reporting is about whether GA4 is organised to answer the questions you actually get asked. Clean data, correctly counted, can still produce misleading channel reports if paid campaigns aren't tagged, or unintelligible page reports if every URL is listed individually.
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Unassigned traffic breakdown
An annotated screenshot of the GA4 Traffic Acquisition report showing Unassigned at 14% of sessions, with callouts pointing to the campaigns missing UTM parameters that are causing the high Unassigned share. A second callout identifies the email campaign rows where medium is blank, and a third shows a paid social row using an unrecognised medium value that doesn't map to any 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 UTM parameters to paid campaigns missing them; check for sources using 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 in GA4 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; run an audit of the Source / Medium report to find variants |
| Content grouping | Are page paths grouped into meaningful sections (Blog, Pricing, Product, Checkout)? | Content groups configured; reports show section-level data not just raw URLs | Set up content grouping via GTM or in-page parameter; register as a custom dimension |
| Sampling and thresholds | Are Exploration reports showing a sampling indicator? | No sampling on the reports you rely on for decisions | Narrow date ranges; use standard reports (not Explorations) for high-level numbers; consider GA4 360 if sampling is persistent |
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Channel grouping configuration
A diagram showing a custom channel group rule in GA4 with conditions for isolating Paid Search (medium exactly matches cpc) and Brand Organic (medium = organic AND source contains brand name). A mapping table below shows how the rule maps raw source/medium pairs (google / cpc, bing / cpc, google / organic with brand query) to clean channel names (Paid Search, Brand Organic), illustrating the difference between the default grouping and a configured one.