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GA4 Google Analytics showing wrong data

Default Channel Group vs Session Default Channel Group vs First User Default Channel Group

Does your Google Analytics (GA4) data seem wrong?

Make sure you know how to use these 3 options in GA4 & Google Looker Studio.

1. Events & conversions only:

Default Channel Group

2. Last touch user session:

Session Default Channel Group

3. First touch user session:

First User Default Channel Group

Important Notes:

  1. GA4 has no current way to show accurate traffic or events, without Google Looker Studio: GA4’s Reports tab does not have full sampling and the Explore tab only allows 2 months of historic data currently, so the only platform you can filter by sales channel accurately is in Google Looker Studio.
  2. GA4 Attribution Settings: This affects the “Default Channel Group” filter. You can customize the number of days ago and the session that receives events & conversions. This means that “Default Channel Group” is neither the First Touch Session nor the Last Touch Session. So if someone first found the site by Organic Search 1 year ago, then clicked on a Paid Ad 30 days ago, and finally converted or paid for something after starting a session by coming to the site as direct traffic a day ago, all 3 types of “Default Channel Group” filtering will give completely different data for sessions and also completely different data for the events recorded.
    1. First User Default Channel Group:
      1. 1 session from a year ago
      2. 0 events
    2. Session Default Channel Group:
      1. 1 Session a day ago
      2. 0 events
    3. Default Channel Group:
      1. 1 Session 30 days ago
      2. 1 Event

Steps to create accurate analytics by sales channel:

  1. Open Google Looker Studio
  2. Create any graph or chart you want.
  3. The filter the graph or the entire page by one of the 3 default channel groups above.
  4. Here are the most used filters. You must use these exact phrases to filter correctly. (Capitalization Matters)
    1. Organic Search
    2. Paid Search
    3. Direct
    4. Referral
    5. Organic Social
      1. Yelp traffic is group in here. Make sure to filter by source / medium if you want to separate Yelp, Instgram, & Facebook traffic and events.
 
This will allow you to automatically display you GSC charts by month, instead of by day. See our other tutorial on how to set the date range to automatically update every day with the specific date range you want.