What is the Unassigned Traffic in GA4

Understanding your website’s traffic sources is key to optimising your marketing efforts. GA4 is a powerful tool for doing just that the majority of the time. But what about when it doesn’t quite give you the information you need to optimise your marketing efforts? “Unassigned ” traffic is one of those areas in which GA4 lacks. Digging around for explanations of the sources defined by Google can be complicated and confusing. That’s why we’re here to give you the rundown on what this elusive source means and why there might have been an increase in traffic coming through this source since Google consent mode came into place.

What is Unassigned Traffic in GA4?

In GA4, “Unassigned Traffic” refers to a segment of web traffic that hasn’t been allocated to any of the usual traffic sources or mediums. This typically occurs when sessions are not attributed to any recognised traffic source or medium in GA4’s default channel grouping. So, if a traffic source or medium is manually set by users or not set at all, and it doesn’t adhere to Google’s rules, it gets labelled under the Unassigned category.

Often, this traffic will not be valuable, as you’ll find many users coming through “unassigned” are bots crawling your website and other similar cases. The introduction of Google Consent mode, however, which you can read up more on in our recent blog article, has led to there being an influx of regular users coming through this source.

The Influence of Google Consent Mode

Google Consent Mode is a significant factor that can contribute to Unassigned traffic in GA4. This new feature allows you to adjust how Google tags behave based on the consent status of your users. With this feature, you can continue to collect valuable analytics data while respecting user choices for ads cookies or analytics cookies.

When a user denies consent, Google Consent Mode will modify the behaviour of GA4 tags. This adjustment can lead to a lack of data for the GA4 algorithm to correctly assign a traffic source or medium, resulting in Unassigned traffic.

This can be frustrating, as to maintain compliance and respect your user’s privacy choices, you’ll need to allow users to browse your website without collecting any data on them. Fortunately, the average website has about a 20-30% rejection rate for cookies, so we’re far from seeing no data being collected at all.

Other factors of Unassigned Traffic

Though there is a large influx due to the addition of consent mode, this is not the only reason for unassigned traffic.

If you’re seeing an abnormally high number of unassigned users, here are some things you can look into:

1. UTM Parameters: Unassigned traffic often arises when UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module) referencing traffic sources or mediums that GA4 doesn’t recognise are used. Incorrect manual tagging or not tagging your URLs with UTM parameters can lead to unassigned traffic.
2. Tracking Implementation Errors: If there are issues with your tracking implementation, GA4 might have missing data or parameters, making it challenging to attribute traffic to the correct source.
3. Ad Blockers: The use of ad blockers and similar privacy tools can prevent GA4 from collecting data accurately, leading to unassigned traffic.
4. Non-standard UTM Values: If your UTM parameters don’t match Google’s standard rules, the session will fall into the Unassigned category.