Think Unassigned Traffic Includes Direct in GA4?

Author

Himanshu Sharma
November 13, 2024

🤔 Think Unassigned Traffic Includes Direct in GA4? 🤯

Direct traffic is specifically identified and attributed to its own channel in GA4.

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If your direct traffic is reported as unassigned, it is likely due to some data collection issue.

It is not the default behaviour of GA4 to group direct traffic with unassigned traffic.

Google uses certain rules (called 'channel rules') to group similar website traffic sources (usually that all belong to the same traffic medium).

Google does not have any pre-defined channel rules to group (not set) traffic.

So what it will do is group these traffic sources under the 'unassigned' channel group.

Unassigned traffic in GA4 refers to website traffic that is not attributed to any of the default channel groups (like organic search, paid search, referral, etc.), and it also includes 'direct traffic'.

So, by default, Unassigned traffic DOES NOT include direct traffic.