Essential Default GA4 Parameters Every Marketer Should Know

The essential default GA4 parameters every marketer should know primarily revolve around how Google Analytics 4 tracks and categorizes traffic sources, user interactions, and sessions. These parameters help marketers understand where their users come from, how they engage, and how to optimise campaigns effectively.

Key default GA4 parameters include:

• Default Marketing Channels: GA4 uses system-defined default channels to group traffic sources. These include channels like Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search, Referral, Affiliates, Email, Display, Paid Social, Organic Social, and more. These channels are identified mainly through UTM parameters and other source/medium data.

• Channel Scopes:

  • Event scope: The channel through which users visit your site/app (first or repeat visits).
  • Session scope: The channel that triggers new sessions.
  • User scope: The channel through which users first arrive at your site/app.

• UTM Parameters: These are critical for GA4 to attribute traffic correctly. The main UTM parameters are:

  • utm_source (identifies the referrer, e.g., google, facebook)
  • utm_medium (identifies the marketing medium, e.g., organic, cpc, affiliate)
  • utm_campaign (identifies the campaign name)
  • Optional: utm_term (keywords) and utm_content (ad content variation).

• Event Parameters: GA4 events can carry parameters that provide additional context about user actions (e.g., page_location, page_referrer, engagement_time_msec). These parameters enrich the data and help marketers build better user experiences and reports.

• Session Timeout: By default, GA4 sets session timeout at 30 minutes of inactivity, which affects how sessions are counted.

• Data Retention Settings: Default data retention is 2 months but can be extended to 14 months, impacting how long user-level data is stored.

• Google Signals: When enabled, this allows GA4 to collect demographic and interest data (age, gender, interests), but it requires privacy considerations.

• Default Channel Grouping Limitations: GA4’s default channel groupings are locked and can sometimes misclassify traffic (e.g., Facebook traffic split across multiple referrers). Marketers often create custom channel groupings to unify and better analyse traffic sources.

In summary, marketers should focus on understanding default marketing channels, UTM parameters, event parameters, session settings, and data retention to leverage GA4 effectively. Custom channel groupings and enabling Google Signals (with privacy compliance) are also important considerations for deeper insights and audience data.