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Channel Grouping

When setting up custom channel groups in GA4, it is very important to get its order of channels right. GA4 uses a top-down approach to assign traffic—meaning it checks each rule in the order you’ve listed them, and the first one that matches wins. Once a session is matched to a rule, GA4 stops looking.

Default Channel Group in GA4 does exactly the same by placing Direct traffic at top. But if a session qualifies for both ‘Direct’ and something more specific like Email or Paid Search, it will be labeled as ‘Direct’—even if it came from a paid campaign. That leads to misclassification and under-reporting of most valuable traffic sources.

The best practice is to treat ‘Direct’ as a fallback. It should be the last rule in your list, only catching sessions that don’t match anything else. Paid and owned channels—like Paid Search, Paid Social, Display, Affiliate, and Email—should come first. These are the channels you invest in and track closely, so they deserve priority in attribution. After that, you can list Organic Search, Organic Social, Referral, and any custom sources you use. Direct should always be last.

Recommended Channel Order:

  1. Paid Search (e.g. Google Ads, Bing)
  2. Paid Social (e.g. Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads)
  3. Display (e.g. Programmatic, GDN)
  4. Affiliate
  5. Email
  6. Organic Search
  7. Organic Social
  8. Referral
  9. Other / Custom
  10. Direct (always last)

This order helps ensure that reporting is accurate and marketing efforts are properly credited.

For more information about each channel listed above please see Google's documentation which can be found at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9756891?hl=en.