How to See Traffic Sources in Google Analytics
Trying to figure out where your website visitors come from is the first step toward making smarter marketing decisions. Google Analytics 4 holds all the answers, showing you which channels are driving traffic and which ones are falling flat. This article will guide you through exactly how to find and understand your traffic source data in GA4, so you can stop guessing and start measuring what actually works.
Why Your Website Traffic Sources Matter
Understanding your traffic sources isn't just a vanity exercise, it's about connecting your marketing efforts to real-world results. When you know where your audience originates, you can optimize your strategy, double down on high-performing channels, and discover untapped opportunities.
Here’s what you gain by analyzing your traffic data:
Measure Your Marketing ROI: Are your Google Ads campaigns actually bringing in valuable visitors? Is the time you spend on social media paying off? Traffic source data helps you attribute success (or failure) directly to your activities, so you know where your budget and time are best spent.
Understand Your Audience Better: Seeing that a significant portion of your traffic comes from a specific referring website or a particular social platform tells you something about your audience's interests and online habits. You can use this insight to create more effective content and messaging.
Identify New Growth Channels: You might be surprised to find an old blog post is suddenly sending a flood of visitors from organic search, or that a small online community is referring a lot of engaged users. This data can reveal unexpected content successes and new communities to engage with.
Optimize Your Website Experience: By segmenting user behavior by traffic source, you can see if visitors from paid search behave differently than those from email campaigns. If one group has a much higher bounce rate, it might indicate a mismatch between your ad copy and your landing page, giving you a clear signal for what to fix.
The Key to Understanding GA4: Traffic Source Dimensions
Before jumping into the reports, it’s helpful to understand a few core concepts GA4 uses to categorize your traffic. If you've used Universal Analytics in the past, some of this will feel familiar, but there are important new distinctions in GA4.
The most fundamental concepts are Source and Medium. They work together to give you a detailed picture of where a visitor came from.
Source: The specific place a user came from, like a search engine or a domain. Examples include "google", "facebook.com", or "mail.google.com".
Medium: The category of the source. Examples include "organic", "cpc" (cost-per-click), "referral", or "email".
In your reports, you’ll typically see them combined, like google / organic or facebook.com / referral.
Perhaps the most important shift in GA4 is how it separates the first time someone discovered you from how they returned for a recent session.
First user source / medium: This dimension tells you how a user first discovered your website. It's tied to the user and stays with them, answering the question: "Which channel originally acquired this person?" This is great for understanding the top of your marketing funnel.
Session source / medium: This dimension shows you how a user arrived for a specific visit. It can change with every new session. This answers the question: "Which channel brought this person to the site this time?" It’s more effective for understanding what drives repeat visits and conversions in the middle of the funnel.
A Quick Look at Default Channel Groups
GA4 also bundles your traffic into broader, high-level categories called Default Channel Groups. These are perfect for getting a quick, bird's-eye view of your performance. You'll see groupings like:
Organic Search: Traffic from search engines like Google or Bing that wasn't the result of a paid ad.
Direct: Traffic from users who typed your URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. This can also be a catch-all for traffic that GA4 can't attribute elsewhere.
Paid Search: Traffic from pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engines (e.g., Google Ads).
Referral: Traffic from users clicking a link on another website.
Organic Social: Visitors from social media platforms that wasn't the result of a paid ad (e.g., a link in a standard Facebook post).
Email: Traffic from links in an email marketing campaign.
Step-by-Step: Finding a Traffic Report in Google Analytics 4
Now that you understand the terminology, let's find the primary report for this information. The main report for analyzing traffic by session is called the Traffic acquisition report.
Here’s how to get there:
Log in to your Google Analytics 4 property.
On the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports (the icon looks like a small chart).
In the menu that appears, look for the "Life cycle" collection and expand the Acquisition topic.
Click on Traffic acquisition.
You’ll now be looking at the Traffic acquisition report. By default, it uses "Session default channel group" as the primary dimension, showing you the high-level categories we just discussed. This table is packed with valuable metrics for each channel, including:
Users: The total number of unique users who initiated at least one session.
Sessions: The number of visits to your site. A single user can have multiple sessions.
Engaged sessions: The number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews. This is GA4's improved version of "Bounce Rate."
Conversions: The number of times users triggered a conversion event (like a purchase or a form submission).
How to Customize Your Traffic Report for Deeper Insights
The default report is a great starting point, but the real power comes from customization. Here are a few ways to dig deeper and get more specific answers from your data.
1. Change the Primary Dimension
Want more detail than the broad channel groups? You can easily change the primary dimension of the report.
Click the small downward arrow next to "Session default channel group" at the top of the table. A dropdown menu will appear. For more granular detail, select Session source / medium. Your report will now update to show the specific sources and mediums driving traffic, like google / cpc, bing / organic, and linkedin.com / referral.
2. Add a Secondary Dimension
This is where your analysis can get really interesting. Adding a secondary dimension lets you cross-reference your traffic sources with another piece of data.
Next to the primary dimension dropdown, click the blue + button. A search menu will pop up with dozens of searchable dimensions. Try adding one of these for new insights:
Landing page + query string: This shows you the exact page a user landed on. Pairing this with "Session source / medium" reveals which specific blog posts or product pages are performing best on Google organic search.
Device category: Cross-reference your traffic sources with whether users were on desktop, mobile, or tablet. You might discover your paid ads convert great on desktop but perform poorly on mobile, pointing to an optimization opportunity.
Country: See a geographical breakdown of your traffic sources.
For example, if you set your primary dimension to Session default channel group and add Landing page + query string as a secondary dimension, you can click into "Organic Search" and see exactly which pages on your site are bringing in the most search engine traffic.
3. Use Filters to Focus on What Matters
If your report feels cluttered, you can use filters to narrow down the data to exactly what you want to see. At the top of the report screen, click Add filter.
Here you can build a filter to include or exclude data based on almost any dimension. For instance, you could build a filter where:
The Session source / medium exactly matches google / organic to analyze only your Google search traffic.
The Country does not contain "United States" to exclude domestic traffic and focus on international performance.
Bonus: Don't Forget the User Acquisition Report
Remember the difference between session and user data? If you want to know how people discovered your brand for the very first time, the User acquisition report is your best friend. You can find it right under the "Traffic acquisition" report in the left-hand navigation menu.
This report looks nearly identical, but its dimensions start with "First user," such as "First user source / medium." This view is invaluable for understanding the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns and telling you which channels are best at introducing new people to your business.
Final Thoughts
By diving into GA4's acquisition reports, you can move from assumptions to answers, learning exactly which channels are driving growth for your business. Spend some time customizing these reports with different dimensions and filters to see how subtle shifts in perspective can reveal powerful new insights about your marketing and your audience.
While Google Analytics is powerful, it often traps your marketing data in just one of many silos. As a business, you're likely juggling data from Google Ads, Shopify, Salesforce, Facebook Ads, and a dozen other tools to get a full picture. Instead of spending hours manually piecing together reports, we built Graphed to do the heavy lifting for you. We connect all your data sources and allow you to ask questions in plain English, instantly creating the live dashboards and reports you need to see what’s truly driving your business forward.