“(not set)” in Google Analytics 4 Reports

Update time: July 26, 2023

In  Google Analytics 4 report, you can see (not set), but the reason for it is different. (not set) is a placeholder name that Google Analytics uses when it hasn’t received information for a dimension.

Landing Page

There are the following reasons:

• Events are Sent Faster than PV：a session doesn’t have a page_view event, if visitors leave quickly after opening the page, so there is no PV sent, but there are sent events.
• Session Timeout：if the user visits the website and returns to the website after more than 30 minutes, the event is triggered but the PV is not triggered, then there will be no landing page for the second visit.

Page Location

The length of Page Location is 1000 bytes, if it exceeds, it will display not set.

Content Group

GA4 reserves the dimension of content group, if you do not set it, it will display not set.

Session Source/Medium

There are the following reasons:

• session_start missing：When the session is opened, there will be a session_start, there will be page_location and page_referral on it, and Source/Medium will get the value from these parameters, but the actual situation is that some sessions will have multiple or zero session_starts, these abnormal session_starts If there is no accurate page_location and page_referral, it will cause Source/Medium to be not set.
• MP Protocol：If the session_id parameter is missing, the source and medium will be not set
• UTM parameters are missing: if UTM parameters are missing, it will also cause not set

Geographic Location

“City” and “Country” are displayed as “(not set)”

There are the following reasons:

• Third-party Vendor have no data:：This dimension is obtained by querying third-party data through IP. If the third-party platform cannot query and there is no data, it will display not set.
• Server-Side Tagging：the IP is removed by default, and naturally there is no geographical location
• MP Protocol：Default no IP address, so naturally there is no geographical location.

Google Ads

If you see (not set) as a dimension in  Advertising reports, there are the following reasons:

• Google Ads account and Analytics property are not linked
• Auto-tagging is not enabled
• Traffic from unlinked Google Ads accounts：Traffic from unlinked Google Ads accounts will appear as (not set) in the Google Ads reports because it’s not possible to map these conversion events to a particular click.
• Manually tagged destination URLs with incomplete or incorrect UTM parameters：When Analytics doesn’t receive the necessary parameters to identify where traffic from manually tagged URLs comes from, (not set) appears.

Transaction ID

If you deploy GA4‘s e-commerce tracking, and the transaction IDs are all numbers, then you may encounter the transaction Id is not set. 

This bug does not seem to be fixed yet, it is recommended to use a combination of English letters and numbers for the transaction ID.

For more bugs about GA4, it is recommended to see:Some Bugs in Google Analytics 4