Google has made several updates to improve the quality of the default channel groups. This is reported in the Service Help.
What has changed:
New channels
The developers have added 8 additional channel groups, including:
- Organic Shopping
- Paid Shopping
- Organic Video
- Paid Video
- Paid other
- Audio
- SMS
- Mobile Push Notifications
For their definitions, see Help.
YouTube is “Video”, not “Social”
YouTube traffic will now be identified in the Paid Video channel or Organic Video channel. Paid Video – if the gclid or utm_medium parameters indicate that the traffic is paid. NIX Solutions notes that it will be identified as an “Organic Video”, if there is no such indication.
Prior to this update, organic traffic from YouTube was identified as Social, while paid traffic (from YouTube ads) was identified as Video, says SearchEngines. The traffic that was purchased through the source “youtube”, with UTM and without gclid, belonged to the “Organic Social” or “Paid Social” channel.
Channels are now more accurately classified
Several changes have been introduced in this direction:
- All rules are now case insensitive.
- Paid channels now also include CPA and CPV. Google Analytics 4 recognizes all channels that match the regular expression ^ (. * Cp. * | Ppc | paid. *) $ As paid.
- The system detects such traffic as Paid Search, Paid Social, Paid Shopping, Paid Video or Paid Other.
- Display advertising channels now additionally include expandable and interstitial ads.
- Traffic from social networks with the UTM tag medium = organic is now assigned to the “Organic Social” channel. Previously, it was defined in “Organic Search”.