How to make sure your links are properly tagged

By July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics, the legacy version of Google Analytics, will stop collecting data. To proceed, marketers must be on track to migrate to the recommended version of Google Analytics 4.

After completing a number of UA to GA4 migrations, one problem that almost always comes up relates to categorizing existing marketing links into Google’s newly defined channels.

Older online marketing links with UTM parameters are no longer categorized in the same way. but why?

This article describes common reasons for misclassification in GA4 and tips for ensuring your marketing campaign links are properly tagged and tracked.

GA4 Incorrectly Classified Links: Common Reasons

There are several reasons for the misclassification, but it may be due to the use of “custom channels” which GA4 no longer supports. It can also be caused by entering an invalid value for the Marketing Link’s Source or Media UTM parameters.

GA4 has not changed or added any new UTM parameters, but has become stricter about the values ​​it accepts. Failure to meet these specific settings will result in the traffic generated from your marketing efforts being classified as “unassigned”.

Campaign URL Formats: What Marketers Need to Know

Let’s review the proper format of marketing/campaign links (according to Google’s requirements) to understand the problem and solution.

The format of the URL is (all lowercase):

https://www.ourcompanysite.com/?utm_source=source&utm_medium=medium&utm_campaign=campaing_name&utm_id=optional_campaign_id&utm_term=optioanl_term&utm_content=optional_content

The example above shows optional parameters.

necessary utm_source Also utm_medium If the parameters do not match certain values, the traffic will be recorded on the “unassigned” channel.

To see the value assigned to that traffic within GA4, simply add a second dimension “Source/Medium” to your channel report.

Handling “unassigned” traffic

In the report below, someone on the marketing team defines media as ‘Post’, which is not one of Google’s defined values. utm_medium Therefore, the traffic is classified as “unassigned”.

Below is an example of someone on the marketing team only wanting to define sources but not media for various marketing efforts, or accidentally assigning invalid media.

Google does not recommend using spaces or hyphens (“-“) in parameter values ​​instead. It is recommended to use underscore ‘_’ instead.

Failure to follow these new recommendations will not impact current GA4 reporting, but it may impact in the future due to ongoing changes.

The new format becomes more important as organizations start using Google’s BigQuery data warehouse to store analytical data beyond the maximum online availability of 14 months. This is an unavoidable task.

Defining source and media parameters

The two parameters that GA4 looks at to correctly classify traffic are:

• utm_source: Traffic referrers (i.e. Google, Newsletter4, Billboard).
• utm_medium: marketing media (i.e. cpc, banners, email).

therefore, utm_source to be equal to “my email list” utm_medium For parity with “EMail”, GA4 may classify it as “Unassigned” instead of “EMail”.

If you’re scratching your head over this, here’s why.

According to GA4 documentation, the following criteria must be met for traffic to be considered from the email channel:

• sauce (utm_source) = email|e-mail|e_mail|e mail
• Moderate (utm_medium) = email|e-mail|e_mail|e mail

For those unfamiliar with regular expressions (or regular expressions), let’s break this down.

• Note that capital letters are not allowed.
• which one utm_source Also utm_medium “|” indicates “or”.

In the example provided, utm_medium “EMail” with both uppercase “E” and “M” means not equal to “email” in the GA4 spec. (Google may convert all parameters to lowercase, but you can’t rely on them to fix errors 100% of the time.)

with the name of the mailing list as the value of utm_source parameters are still allowed, but utm_medium Equivalent to “email”. (However, this is not ideal. It would be better to assign the name of the mailing list to his one of the optional parameters, or at least make it all lowercase with spaces removed.)

Also, Google’s example of acceptable values ​​allows the use of “email” (with a space), but it is discouraged and should be avoided.

Similar specifications are available for all 19 GA4 channels. A complete list of each channel and allowed values ​​can be found here.

Pay attention to paid channels

Don’t worry about non-advertising channels (i.e. organic search, organic social, direct, referrals, etc.), but focus on all other channels.

Pay-per-view channels require special attention. The new ones are:

• Paid Social.
• Paid shopping.
• cross network.

All paid channels with “Traffic is Google Ads” in their requirements utm_medium value is set to either “cpc”, “ppc”, or “paid”.

The value of the utm_source Based on a list defined by Google, the values ​​for sites determined by Google to be search/social/video sites must match those for sites that are not.

(This is a downloadable Excel spreadsheet containing the full list. utm_source values ​​used by Google and how they are classified).

For example, in the URL utm_source=blogger When utm_medium=cpcdisplayed as “Paid Social” in GA4.

if other values ​​are used utm_medium Beyond “cpc”, “ppc”, or “paid”, it simply appears as “organic social”.

Our spreadsheets are constantly being updated, so be sure to download the latest before guessing how new advertising partners will be classified.

What happens to “unassigned” campaign data?

All marketing links should be actively adjusted to the new Google Analytics requirements, but they may be data already captured and reported as “unassigned” or custom channels you have defined for Universal Analytics. What can you do with sensitive data?

This can be addressed when extracting data from GA4 or BigQuery via Google’s Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) or other business intelligence tools.

Within these you can define your own logic. utm_source When utm_medium Equal to the value defined in the UA custom channel and assign it to your own channel. (Hence the custom channel.)

Digging In: MarTech’s In-Depth GA4 Coverage

Adapting to GA4 Campaign Tracking Criteria

Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 differ in many ways. There are technical reasons behind these differences, and they are all well-intentioned.

For marketers accustomed to the traditional approach to tracking marketing campaigns, being different isn’t always a good thing. But one thing you can easily do is ensure that your online marketing efforts are tagged and categorized into your preferred channels.

Addressing this before migrating from UA to GA4 will help reduce migration headaches and the effort required to fix them after the inevitable migration.