- [Brad] I'm hear in the channels report,

and I got here by selecting Channels

from under All Traffic within the acquisition reports.

It's here that we can see all of our Channel Groups,

like Organic Search and Affiliates.

And Channel Groupings are essentially rule-based groupings

of your traffic sources.

So there's a rule that Google applies automatically

that says this search engine belongs in organic search,

and it helps because you don't need to go out

and manually add every single search engine into a group.

Google simply applies the rule automatically

at a system level.

Affiliates is configured such that when you enter partners

as your UTM source, it automatically appears in this bucket.

Now Channel Groups are incredibly helpful,

because it lets you look at data across a large channel.

So you can understand how your campaigns

are influencing things from a high level.

But it's very likely that you'd like to customize

how Google Analytics group channels,

or even create Channel Groups of your own.

And to do that, we'll start by selecting admin

in the lower left hand corner.

We'll then switch to the account

that we're interested in working on.

And then from under the view panel,

I'll select Channel Settings and then Channel Grouping.

I'll select Default Channel Grouping,

and this allows us to see how the Default Channel Groups

are set up.

We can see they're all System Defined

and if I select edit next to Social,

you can see that the rule is

the System Defined Channel matches Social.

Now we'll point out,

Google is quick to let you know that any edits

that you make to the default Channel Grouping

will change how your traffic is classified.

If you'd like to change the Channel Groups

without changing any of the actual data,

you can create a new channel group

and you do that, simply by selecting Custom Channel Grouping

here on the left-hand side.

So for starters, you can add rules.

So within Social,

you can say the System Defined Channel matches this, And,

and then you can add in an additional rule

or you can change it to an Or.

If you'd like to remove the rule,

simply select the minus icon.

You also have the ability to change the color

and then simply select Done,

if you want to save those changes.

Now let's say we want to create a new channel

and call this one, Influencer.

Let's say for example,

we do a lot of campaigns with influencers

and we always set the custom UTM source

to contain influencer.

Here we can simply select Source, Contains, Influencer,

set the color and choose Done.

And now whenever the source matches Influencer,

it'll automatically aggregate into that bucket,

which allows us to view it at the Channel Grouping level,

which is slightly different than viewing it

at the campaign level.

And furthermore, you can layer in more and more sources

to aggregate into these custom channels.

Channel Groupings really allow you to further unlock

and customize Google Analytics to fit your specific needs.

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