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The Mystery of Not Set in GA4 New vs Established Dimension
Hey there!
I’ve been playing around with this GA4 exploration I set up. I made it pretty simple – just one dimension (New vs Established), and one metric (sessions). It seems straightforward, right? But here’s the funny thing – I’ve noticed a smidge of the sessions, like only 0.5%, are coming up as ‘(not set)‘ in the ‘New vs Established’ dimension.
It’s not enough to skew the reporting, but it’s got me scratching my head, you know? It’s either one or the other… so how do we end up with a ‘neither’ category?
First, I thought it might be linked to certain events. But nope, it’s showing a similar percentage for session starts, page views, and even custom events.
Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Much appreciated!
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2 Replies
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Sure! When you create custom dimensions, it can take about 48 hours for the data to settle in. Google Analytics needs this time to properly process and categorize everything. So, if you’ve recently added or adjusted the ‘New vs Established’ dimension, this could explain why you’re seeing ‘(not set)’. Don’t worry though, it should sort itself out in a couple of days. You can learn more about this from the Google Analytics documentation regarding custom dimensions.
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In Google Analytics, the “(not set)” entry is quite common and it occurs when Analytics hasn’t received any information for the dimension you’ve selected. For the case of ‘New vs Established’, it’s possible that for 0.5% of your sessions, Google Analytics was unable to determine whether the user was new or returning. There can be multiple reasons for this – it could be related to the users’ browser settings, such as blocking cookies or using incognito mode, which prevent Google Analytics from accurately tracking and categorizing the user. It might also be due to a small delay in data processing within Google Analytics itself. In all cases, it’s good to note that a small amount of ‘(not set)’ data is pretty normal and typically doesn’t impact your overall insights significantly.
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