How to See What Platform Users Came From in Google Analytics 4

Trying to figure out where your website visitors are coming from is one of the most fundamental questions in marketing. Knowing whether your traffic is driven by organic search, a specific social media campaign, or an email newsletter is essential for making smart decisions about your time and budget. This article will show you exactly how to find this information in Google Analytics 4, from basic reports to more advanced techniques.

First, Understand the New GA4 Lingo

Before jumping into reports, it's important to grasp a key distinction in GA4 that didn't exist in the same way in Universal Analytics: the difference between the first time a user visited and their current visit (session).

• First user acquisition: This tells you how a user originally discovered your site. For example, 'First user source' shows the channel that brought them to you for their very first session. This is great for understanding the long-term value of your acquisition channels.
• Session acquisition: This focuses on the source of the current session you're analyzing. A user might have first found you through Google Search, but today's visit might be from your email newsletter.

For most day-to-day analytics, you'll likely spend more time looking at session-based metrics, as they tell you what's driving traffic right now. We'll focus on those in this guide.

Finding Your Traffic Sources: The Main 'Traffic Acquisition' Report

Your primary destination for sourcing traffic data is the Traffic acquisition report. Here’s how to get there and interpret what you find.

Step-by-Step Guide to Accessing the Report

1. Log into your Google Analytics 4 property.
2. On the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports (the icon that looks like a bar chart).
3. Under the 'Life cycle' dropdown, click on Acquisition.
4. Finally, select Traffic acquisition from the Acquisition submenu.

You’ll now see a dashboard with a couple of graphs at the top and a detailed table at the bottom. This table is where the magic happens. By default, it groups your traffic by ‘Session default channel group.’ This is GA4's top-level, automated bucketing system, which includes categories like:

• Organic Search: Visitors from search engines like Google or Bing.
• Direct: Visitors who typed your URL directly or whose source couldn't be determined.
• Referral: Visitors who clicked a link from another website (excluding major search engines).
• Organic Social: Visitors from social media platforms who didn't click on a paid ad.
• Paid Search: Visitors from paid ads on search engines (e.g., Google Ads).
• Display: Visitors from display ad campaigns.

While useful for a high-level overview, you'll often need more specific information.

Changing the Primary Dimension to See Specific Platforms

The real power of this report comes from changing the primary dimension (the first column of the table). You can drill down to see the exact platforms sending you traffic.

Click the small downward arrow next to ‘Session default channel group’ at the top of the table. A search bar and list of options will appear. Here are the most useful dimensions for identifying platforms:

• Session source / medium: This is a classic and one of the most helpful views. It combines the 'who' (the source) with the 'how' (the medium). Examples: google / organic, facebook.com / referral, hubspot / email.
• Session source: This shows only the source platform or domain where the traffic came from. Examples: google, facebook.com, linkedin.com.
• Session medium: This shows the general category of the traffic source. Examples: organic, cpc (cost-per-click), referral, email.
• Session campaign: This shows the specific campaign name, provided you’ve properly tagged your URLs (more on that later!). Examples: summer_sale_2024, newsletter_july_feature, black_friday_promo.

By switching the primary dimension to Session source / medium, you'll get a granular, easy-to-read list of exactly where your users are coming from and the type of link they clicked to get there.

Going Deeper with Secondary Dimensions

Once you’ve identified your top traffic platforms, you might want to learn more about the visitors they’re sending. This is where secondary dimensions come in handy. A secondary dimension adds another column to your report, allowing you to cross-reference data for deeper insights.

To add one, click the blue “+” icon to the right of the primary dimension drop-down menu in the LRA report table.

A Few Powerful Combinations to Try:

• To see which pages specific channels send traffic to:
• To analyze user location by platform:
• To understand device usage by traffic channel:

Taking Control with UTM Parameters

While GA4 is great at categorizing common traffic sources automatically, it can sometimes get confused. For example, traffic from a social media app might be labeled as ‘Direct’ if GA4 can't trace its origin. The solution? UTM parameters.

UTM parameters, short for "Urchin Tracking Module," are simple tags you add to the end of a URL. These tags give Google Analytics precise information about where the click came from. When a user clicks a UTM-tagged link, GA4 reads these tags and sorts the traffic into the exact source, medium, and campaign you defined.

The Core UTM Parameters:

• utm_source: The specific platform where the link is shared. (e.g., utm_source=facebook, utm_source=newsletter)
• utm_medium: The general marketing channel. (e.g., utm_medium=social, utm_medium=email)
• utm_campaign: The name of your specific promotion or campaign. (e.g., utm_campaign=summer-launch)

You can create these manually, but it's easier to use a tool like Google's Campaign URL Builder. Simply input your URL and the parameter values, and it generates the final tagged link for you.

Example: If you want to track clicks on a specific link in your July email newsletter about a summer sale, your URL might look like this: https://www.yourstore.com/new-arrivals?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=july_summer_sale

When someone clicks that link, GA4 will now know exactly where they came from. In your Traffic Acquisition report, this visit will appear under the newsletter / email source/medium and the july_summer_sale campaign. No more guesswork!

Building Your Own Reports in the 'Explore' Section

For more advanced analysis, GA4's standard reports might feel limiting. The Explore section is a powerful feature that allows you to build completely custom reports from scratch, much like a pivot table in a spreadsheet.

While a full tutorial of Explore is beyond the scope of this article, here's a quick overview of how you could build a simplified traffic source report:

1. Navigate to Explore in the left-hand menu.
2. Start a new report by clicking on the Blank template.
3. In the 'Variables' column on the left, click the “+” next to Dimensions and import Session source / medium and Device Category.
4. Click the “+” next to Metrics and import Sessions, Engaged sessions, Conversions, and Total revenue.
5. Drag the Dimensions you want to analyze into the "Rows" or "Columns" sections in the 'Tab Settings' panel. For example, drag Session source / medium to Rows.
6. Drag the Metrics you want to measure into the ‘Values’ section. For example, drag in Sessions and Conversions.

You’ll see a table built in real-time on the right. Explore unlocks a tremendous amount of flexibility, letting you visualize your user platform data in nearly any way you can imagine.

Final Thoughts

Tracking where your users came from is no longer a mystery. By using GA4's Traffic acquisition report, switching between primary and secondary dimensions, and implementing UTM tags for your campaigns, you have all the information you need to understand which platforms are fueling your growth.

Of course, manually pulling these reports together across Google Analytics, your various ad platforms, and your sales tools is often slow and repetitive. At Graphed, we built a tool to eliminate this manual work entirely. We connect seamlessly to all your marketing and sales data sources (including GA4), and let you ask questions in plain English - like "Show me which Facebook campaigns are driving the most revenue this month" - to instantly get the charts, reports, and dashboards you need, updated in real-time.