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Audit your channel grouping against the UTMs actually landing on your property. Catch the traffic buckets leaking into Direct or Unassigned.
UTMs break in five ways and most of them show up as a drop in Direct traffic + a bump in Unassigned traffic that nobody can explain. Campaigns set in ad platforms with inconsistent `utm_source` casing (Google vs google vs GOOGLE). Mail tools like Mailchimp stripping parameters. Redirects dropping the query string. Agency partners using `utm_medium=social` for what should be paid. The practical result: your attribution reports misallocate 5–15% of sessions every quarter and the CMO asks why "direct traffic" just went up again.
GA4-MSR-11Channel group completenessGA4-MSR-12Source/medium casing consistencyGA4-OPT-02Unassigned traffic diagnosisGA4-OPT-03Attribution model alignment with channel mapGA4-FND-04Cross-domain tracking configurationPaid social campaigns tagged `utm_medium=social` are landing in Unassigned instead of Paid Social because your channel grouping rule set requires `paid_social` for that bucket. Affects ROAS calculation for every paid social campaign — they appear to drive 0 attributed conversions when the reporting is pulled at channel-group granularity.
Two-part fix. (1) In GA4 admin → Data Display → Channel groups → [your grouping] → edit Paid Social, add an OR condition: `Session medium` matches `social`. (2) At the source, fix your Facebook/LinkedIn UTM tagging template to use `paid_social` going forward. Old campaigns get patched retroactively by rule (1); new campaigns stay clean by rule (2).
UTM parameter hygiene is one of 6 high-stakes chores the audit covers end-to-end. Your first audit is free, takes 60 seconds, and catches what your setup has been quietly getting wrong.