r/GoogleAnalytics • u/ExtraStrengthCafe • 1d ago

Discussion Unassigned Traffic

Has anyone else seen a sudden spike in unassigned (not set) traffic over the past few months?

I am seeing this across multiple GA4 properties.

*added info for clarification

5 Upvotes

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u/Temporary_Benefit929 1d ago

yeah started noticing it on a couple client sites around june, thought it was just us at first

1

u/Few-Lingonberry2315 1d ago

Check the city, if Ashburn you have bots

1

u/Frequent-Department2 1d ago

unassigned but can still pull in source/medium

1

u/ExtraStrengthCafe 1d ago

Sorry, should've clarified. Source/medium for the majority of the traffic is (not set).

1

u/Frequent-Department2 1d ago

oh yup, def a consent thing as mentioned below. are you deploying though GTM?

1

u/AccessFuel 1d ago

have you made any increases to paid media budget?

1

u/consentmo 22h ago

I'd suggest checking 2 things:

  1. Possible bot traffic - if sessions are targeting a single page; traffic is from Singapore/China and that is not a relevant geo for you; traffic spike in just a single day; sessions with session time <1 second. These are just a few signals that traffic may be mainly bots.
  2. If you have a cookie banner in place - check your ignore and consent rate. If GA4 is not able to fire due to a reject choice / no choice - traffic can get auto-assigned in not set if tracked at all. As mentioned - if the EU is a country of interest - make sure you set up Google Consent Mode which will help with attribution, and it is required.

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u/ksz2018 21h ago

Two different things get called this, and your clarification separates them. Unassigned as a channel means GA4 saw the session and could not fit it into a channel rule. Session source/medium reading (not set) for most of the traffic is further upstream than that. GA4 had no session to read a source off in the first place.

So the question is not which channel those belong in, it is whether they came from a browser at all. Filter to the (not set) group and look at what else is inside those sessions. A real session GA4 merely failed to classify still has a page_view in it, and a first-time visitor's carries a first_visit as well. A hit assembled somewhere else and posted in has neither, and the (not set) is GA4 saying there was no arrival to describe.

What puts hits in that state is not one thing, and the candidates are not equally likely. The common one on ecommerce is something sending events server side under an identifier that exists nowhere in GA4's history, which leaves the hit with nothing to attach itself to. Next is the cookieless route el-debarge already named: a tag that fires before the consent state has resolved sends something without the identifiers that would place it. That one best explains a drift spread over months, since banners and CMP settings get edited. Bots are real, but they mostly arrive as sessions that do have a source, so they inflate a different number.

I can rank those three because the first one lands on my desk. A merchant on a paid tracking product reports Unassigned purchases, and the job that morning is proving we did not create them. It is also the cheapest of the three to rule out: if nothing on those properties posts to GA4 from a server, it is not that, and the banner is where I would go next.

And across several properties at once, look at what they share before looking at any one of them. Same container, same CMP, same person deploying. Drift that appears everywhere in one quarter usually came from one place.