What is Cross Network in Google Analytics 4?

If you've spent any time in your Google Analytics 4 acquisition reports, you've probably seen it: "Cross-network" sitting high up on your list of channels, often driving a significant amount of traffic and conversions. Its name is vague, it doesn't offer much obvious information, and it can leave you wondering if it's something you created by mistake. This article will show you exactly what the Cross-network channel is, why Google added it to GA4, and how you can analyze its performance properly.

What Exactly Is 'Cross-network' in GA4?

In short, Cross-network is a channel grouping that bundles traffic coming from automated Google Ads campaigns that run across multiple channels. The primary driver of this traffic is Performance Max (PMax), but you might also see traffic from Smart Shopping campaigns designated this way.

Think about how Performance Max works. You provide Google with assets like headlines, images, and videos, and it automatically creates and serves ads across its entire inventory. That means a single PMax campaign could show your ads on:

• Google Search
• YouTube
• The Google Display Network
• Gmail
• Google Discover
• Google Maps

When a user converts from one of these campaigns, their journey might involve multiple touchpoints. For example, they might see your video ad on YouTube, then later get a retargeting ad on a news website (Display), and finally perform a branded search before clicking a search ad and buying something. GA4's attribution can see that all of these touchpoints belong to the same multi-channel campaign. Instead of trying to give credit to just Search, Display, or Video, GA4 groups it under the umbrella term "Cross-network." It's Google's way of acknowledging that the conversion came from a blended, multi-faceted campaign.

This is a major departure from Universal Analytics. In the old system, traffic from a campaign like this would have been split up and credited to individual channels like Paid Search or Display based on the last click, often hiding the true, combined impact of the campaign.

Why Is Cross-network a Default Channel Now?

The introduction of the Cross-network channel reflects the evolution of online advertising. Google is moving heavily towards AI-driven, automated campaign types that remove the manual work of siloed channel management. Cross-network is simply GA4's reporting response to this shift.

1. The Rise of Performance Max

PMax is at the center of this change. It gives Google’s AI control over bidding, placements, and creative combinations to achieve a specific goal (like sales or leads). Because the AI makes decisions across platforms in real-time, the traditional attribution model of "who gets the last-click credit?" becomes less meaningful. For a single PMax campaign, assigning credit solely to a 'Paid Search' click overlooks the role a YouTube ad or a Display banner played in influencing that behavior. Cross-network reporting is meant to reflect the holistic nature of these campaigns.

2. Moving Beyond Last-Click Attribution

For years, marketers have known that last-click attribution doesn't tell the full story. It ignores all the preceding touchpoints that primed a customer for conversion. The Cross-network label is a pragmatic solution. It admits that pinpointing a single source for a PMax conversion is less important than recognizing the overall success of the integrated campaign strategy driving it.

3. Aligning Analytics with Ad Platform Structure

In your Google Ads account, PMax is a single campaign. But in old analytics platforms, its results would be fragmented across different channel reports, making it difficult to assess its true ROI. By creating a dedicated "Cross-network" channel, GA4 aligns your analytics data more closely with how you manage the campaigns in Google Ads, allowing you to see the campaign’s combined impact in one row.

How to Locate and Analyze Cross-network Traffic

Finding this traffic is straightforward. You will primarily see it in any report that uses the Session default channel group dimension. Here's the most common place to look:

1. Navigate to your GA4 property.
2. From the left-hand menu, go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
3. The report will load with Session default channel group as the primary dimension. You should see "Cross-network" in the table alongside other channels like Organic Search, Direct, and Paid Social.

Once you've located it, you can start to evaluate its performance just like any other channel. Look at key metrics such as:

• Users and Sessions: Is it a significant source of traffic volume for you?
• Engaged sessions / Engagement rate: Is this traffic sticking around? A high engagement rate is typically a good sign, showing the audience is qualified. A low rate might suggest your PMax campaigns are targeting too broadly.
• Conversions: Most importantly, is it driving your key business outcomes? Make sure your most important conversions (like purchase or generate_lead) are properly configured.
• Total revenue (for e-commerce): Is Cross-network generating profitable activity? Compare its revenue directly against other paid channels.

Is Cross-network Traffic "Good" or "Bad"?

Cross-network is not inherently good or bad - it's just a reporting label for a PMax powered source of traffic. Whether its performance is good for your business depends on the quality and efficiency of that traffic.

When you see Cross-network with a high number of sessions and conversions, your immediate reaction might be positive. However, you need to dig deeper to understand the complete picture.

Check For Channel Cannibalization

One of the most common concerns with PMax - and by extension, the Cross-network channel - is its tendency to capture traffic that might have otherwise come through other channels, particularly branded search.

Since PMax campaigns often serve ads on branded search terms, it can look like it's generating new conversions when, in reality, it's just capturing users who were already looking for you. To check this:

• Go to your Traffic acquisition report.
• Compare the trends of your 'Organic Search' and 'Paid Search' channels to your 'Cross-network' channels over time.
• If you see a sharp, sustained drop in Organic Search conversions that corresponds with a rise in Cross-network conversions after launching a PMax campaign, it might be a sign of cannibalization.

You can mitigate this in Google Ads by adding your brand terms as negative keywords at the account level (after requesting assistance from Google support), forcing PMax to focus more on non-branded, top-of-funnel discovery.

Compare Its KPIs to Other Channels

How does Cross-network stack up? Compare its engagement rate, conversion rate, and average order value (if applicable) to your other paid channels. If 'Cross-network' has a much lower conversion rate than 'Paid Search', it might be because PMax is spending heavily on Display or YouTube placements that generate awareness but not direct sales. This isn't necessarily a failure, but it's important context when evaluating performance and setting budgets in Google Ads.

Advanced Tips for Analyzing Cross-network Data

Just looking at the main channel label won't give you actionable insights. To truly understand performance, you need to leverage secondary dimensions and the data within a linked Google Ads account.

1. Use a Secondary Dimension For Clarity

The default report is too high-level. The key is to add a secondary dimension to break the data down further. In the Traffic acquisition report:

• Click the blue '+' icon next to the primary dimension dropdown.
• In the search box, find and select Session campaign.

This will reveal the specific Google Ads campaign names associated with your traffic. Now, when you look at the 'Cross-network' row, you can see which PMax (or other) campaign is responsible for those metrics. This is invaluable when you are running multiple A/B test experiments.

2. Go To Google Ads for Asset-Level Insight

While GA4 can tell you that a PMax campaign is working (and how users from it behave on your site), it can’t tell you which parts of that campaign are most effective. For that level of detail, you must go into your Google Ads account.

Inside Google Ads, navigate to your PMax campaign and look at the Asset groups reporting. There, you can see performance metrics broken down by individual assets, including:

• Which headlines and descriptions have the best click-through rates.
• Which images and videos are driving the most engagement.
• Performance data for your product listings if you're using a Merchant Center feed.

You use GA4's Cross-network report to gauge overall impact, and you use Google Ads reports to optimize the levers that create that impact.

3. Ensure Proper Account Linking

None of this works effectively if your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts aren't properly linked. To check this:

1. In GA4, go to Admin (the gear icon at the bottom left).
2. Under the 'Product Links' section in the 'Property' column, click Google Ads Links.
3. Ensure your correct Google Ads account is listed with a 'Linked' status.

An improper or missing link is a common reason for seeing 'Unassigned' traffic, and it also prevents you from pulling in a full set of granular marketing performance dimensions into GA4, like your ad campaign, ads, or keywords.

Putting all this data together tells a complete narrative: GA4's Cross-network identifies PMax as a key performance driver, secondary dimensions in GA4 tell you which campaign it is, and the asset group reporting in Google Ads tells you how to make it perform even better. They are different tools that, when used together, provide an incredibly full understanding of the effectiveness of our marketing initiatives.

Final Thoughts

Cross-network isn’t a bug or a misconfiguration, it’s GA4's sensible way of reporting on sophisticated, multi-platform ad campaigns like Performance Max. By understanding that it represents this blended traffic, you can move past the confusion and begin analyzing it effectively. Add the campaign name as a secondary dimension to pinpoint performance and dive into your Google Ads account to optimize the headlines, images, and audience signals that feed the machine.

Manually connecting insights from Google Analytics, Google Ads, your CRM, and your e-commerce platform to get a full picture of performance is often time-consuming. We built Graphed to cut through this complexity and deliver automated insights, so you don’t have to spend your day bouncing between different platforms. With all your marketing and sales data in one place, you can ask simple questions in plain language, like "show me our PMax campaign ROI last month" or "which campaigns are driving the most qualified leads in HubSpot?", and Graphed builds a live dashboard instantly, giving you back the time to focus on strategy instead of report-building.