aign tracking in GA4 – How to make sure your links are correctly tagged

Universal Analytics, an older version of Google Analytics will stop collecting data by July 1, 2023. Marketers should be ready to migrate to Google Analytics 4, in order to get ahead.

One issue that has recurred in all cases of UA to GA4 migrations is the categorizing of existing marketing links into Google’s new channels.

It is no longer possible to categorize old online marketing links that used UTM parameters. Why?

This article will discuss common causes of miscategorization within GA4 as well as tips for making sure that your marketing campaign links can be properly tagged.

GA4 Misclassified Links: Common Reasons

There are many reasons why miscategorizing can occur. Sometimes it’s due to using a “custom channels” that GA4 does not support. Sometimes it’s due to incorrect values being entered in the marketing link’s source parameters or medium UTM parameters.

GA4 hasn’t modified or added UTM parameters to their system, but they are more stringent in accepting values. Traffic generated by your marketing efforts will be classified as “Unassigned” if they do not meet these requirements.

How to format campaign URLs: What marketers should know

Let’s examine the correct format for a campaign/marketing link to understand the problem.

URL format must be in 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 above example shows optional parameters.

If the source or medium parameters are not compatible, traffic is recorded in the channel “Unassigned”.

You can view GA4 traffic values by adding the second dimension “source/medium” to your channel report.

Handling unassigned traffic

The report below shows that someone from the marketing team defined the medium “post”, which is not one Google’s values for utm_medium. Therefore, the traffic is classified as “Unassigned.”

Here are some examples where a member of the marketing team wanted to identify the source, but not the medium, for different marketing efforts.

Google discourages the use of spaces in parameter values, and even hyphens (“-“) to replace them. An underscore “_” is preferred as a replacement.

These new recommendations will not have an impact on GA4 reports right now, but it could in the future.

This new format is even more important if your company uses Google’s BigQuery data warehouse for analytics data storage beyond the 14-month limit online — an unavoidable undertaking.

Definition of medium and source parameters

GA4 is focused on two parameters to correctly categorize traffic:

• utm_source The traffic referrer (i.e. google, newsletter4, billboard).
• utm_medium The marketing medium (i.e. banner, email, cpc).

If you set the source to be “My Email List” as well as the medium to be “EMail”, GA4 might categorize it “Unassigned” instead.

This is the answer if you are still unsure.

The following criteria must be fulfilled according to GA4 documentation in order for traffic to be considered via the email channel.

• Source (utm_source) = email|e-mail|e_mail|e mail
• Medium (utm_medium) = email|e-mail|e_mail|e mail

Regular expressions (or regex) are not something that many people are familiar with. Let’s take a look at them.

• You can’t capitalize.
• ” indicates “or.”

The Utm_medium does not contain “Email”. However, the utm_medium has both an uppercase and lowercase “E” which means that it is not equivalent to “email” according to the GA4 specification. Google can convert all parameters to lowercase but you cannot rely on them fixing your mistakes 100% of the times.

It is possible to use the name of an email group as the value for the source parameter, provided that the Utm_medium equals “email.” (This is not ideal. It is best to assign the email list name to one of the optional parameters.

It is also permissible to use “email” (with a space) in the Google example. However, this should not be done.

For all 19 GA4 channels, similar specifications are available. contains a complete listing of all channels and acceptable values.

Pay attention to the paid channels

We don’t need to worry about non-advertising channels, such as organic search, social media, direct, referral, and so on. We need to focus on the others.

Payed channels need special attention. These are the new channels:

• Paid Social
• Paid shopping
• Cross-network.

All paid channels that have “Traffic Is Google Ads” as their requirements indicate that the Utm_medium value must be set to either “cpc”, ‘ppc”, or “paid.”

The source value must match the Google site value.

(Here’s an Excel spreadsheet that you can download, which contains the complete list of utm_source Google values and how they are categorized.

If your URL contains utm_source=blogger or utm_medium=cpc it will be displayed as “Paid Social” on GA4.

utm_medium will be referred to as “Organic Social” if any value is added to it beyond “cpc”, ppc, or “paid”.

Google’s spreadsheet is always being updated. Make sure you download the most recent version before you assume how new advertising partners will be classified.

What happens to campaign data that isn’t assigned?

We need to be proactive about aligning our marketing links with the new Google Analytics requirements. But what do we do with data already captured and reported as “Unassigned”? Or perhaps it was a custom channel that you created for Universal Analytics?

This issue can be solved by extracting data from GA4 and BigQuery via Google’s Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio), or any other business intelligence tool.

These allow you to define your own logic so utm_source, utm_medium are equal to the values defined in your UA channel. You can then assign this channel. (Hence, a custom channel.)

Dig deeper: MarTech’s in-depth GA4 coverage

Adopting GA4’s campaign tracking standard

Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 are different in many ways. These differences are due to technical reasons, but all with good intent.

Marketers who have been used to tracking campaigns using the traditional method of tracking their marketing campaigns know that being different is not always a good thing. One thing we can control is how our online marketing efforts get tagged so they are classified in our preferred channels.

This can be done before you make the move from UA to GA4. It will reduce the stress of the transition as well as the effort required to correct them once you’ve made the inevitable.

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