Update time: January 11, 2025
In GA4, “not set” is a placeholder name that Google Analytics 4 uses when it hasn’t received information for a dimension.
You can see “not set” but the reason for it is different：
not set in Landing Page
There are the following reasons:
- Events are Sent Faster than PV：a session doesn’t have a
page_viewevent, 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.
not set in Page Location
The length of Page Location is 1000 bytes, if it exceeds, it will display not set.
not set in Page Title
There are following reasons:
- The title parameter is missing in HTML
- GA4 triggers quickly, and the title parameter is sent before it is loaded. The possibility of this is relatively low.
not set in Content Group
GA4 reserves the dimension of content group, if you do not set it, it will display not set.
Read more : How to Set Up Content Groups in Google Analytics 4
not set in 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
not set in 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.
not set in 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
not set in Promotions
The Promotions report is a pre-made detailed report that shows the impact of each promotion on purchases and revenue.
GA4 does not yet support on-site attribution, so Add To Cart, check out Out and purchase are classified into not set.
not set in Custom Dimensions
If the value is not obtained, it is not set, such as the custom dimension member_level:
not set in New / established
This is because New User has not sent first_open/first_visit within the selected time range.
If a new user visits within the selected time but does not send first_open or first_visit, it will not be classified into New User, and it has not visited before, so it will not be classified into Established Users, so it will be classified into not set.
not set in 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.
