How to See Where Traffic is Coming from Google Analytics

Wondering where your website visitors are actually coming from is one of the first big questions you'll face when trying to grow your audience. Knowing which marketing channels drive results - and which ones are falling flat - is the difference between guessing and making smart, data-driven decisions. This guide will walk you through exactly how to find and understand your traffic sources reports in a standard Google Analytics 4 property.

Why You Should Care About Your Traffic Sources

Before jumping into GA4, it's worth taking a moment to understand why this matters. Tracking your website's traffic sources isn't about vanity metrics or impressing your team with a big number. It's about strategy. When you know where people are coming from, you can:

Double down on what works: If you discover that organic search brings in your most engaged customers, you know that investing more time and resources into SEO is a wise move. If a specific social media channel is outperforming others, that's where your focus should go.
Trim your marketing spend: Are those paid ads you're running actually sending converting traffic, or are you just burning cash? Analyzing your traffic sources will give you a clear answer, allowing you to cut the underperformers and allocate your budget more effectively.
Uncover hidden opportunities: You might discover a small, niche blog is sending you a surprising amount of high-quality referral traffic. This is a clear signal to build a relationship with that website owner, perhaps through collaborations or guest posts.
Understand user behavior: Visitors from different sources often behave differently. People arriving from a Pinterest link might be in exploration mode, while someone from a Google search for your brand name is likely ready to convert. Understanding these nuances helps you tailor your content and user experience.

In short, your traffic sources report is a roadmap. It tells you where you’ve been and provides clues on the best path forward for growth.

Navigating to the Traffic Acquisition Report in GA4

Google Analytics 4 can seem a bit intimidating at first, but finding the primary report for traffic sources is straightforward once you know where to look. This is the main dashboard that gives you a high-level overview of which channels are driving your traffic.

Here’s how to get there:

Log in to your Google Analytics account.
On the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports (it looks like a small bar chart icon).
Under the Life cycle collection, click to expand the Acquisition dropdown menu.
Select Traffic acquisition.

You'll now see a report with a graph at the top and a table below it. This table is your starting point, typically showing data organized by the "Session default channel group."

A Quick Note: User Acquisition vs. Traffic Acquisition

In that same menu, you'll see "User acquisition" and "Traffic acquisition." Here's the simple difference:

User Acquisition: Tells you where brand new users came from for their very first visit. It's about answering, "How did we acquire this person initially?"
Traffic Acquisition: Tells you where users came from for a specific session (visit). It’s about answering, "How did this particular visit start?" A loyal customer might have first discovered you via organic search but now visits you weekly by typing your URL directly.

For day-to-day analysis of your marketing efforts, the Traffic acquisition report is generally more useful.

Decoding GA4's Traffic Channels

Once you're in the Traffic acquisition report, you'll see a list of channels in the main table. These are Google's default groupings that help categorize your traffic. Understanding what each one means is fundamental to getting real insights.

Direct

What it means: This includes people who typed your URL directly into their browser, used a browser bookmark to visit your site, or clicked a link in a non-web document (like a PDF or mobile app). However, it’s realistically GA4’s "I'm not sure" bucket. If traffic can't be attributed to any other source, it often ends up here. A high percentage of Direct traffic can indicate poor campaign tagging.

Organic Search

What it means: This represents visitors who arrived at your website after clicking on an unpaid search result in a search engine like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. This is a powerful indicator of your site's SEO health and its visibility in search results.

Organic Social

What it means: This traffic comes from clicks on non-paid links from social media platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. It's a measure of your reach and engagement on your social profiles.

Paid Search

What it means: This categorizes visitors who clicked on one of your paid advertisements within a search engine's results, like Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising. You must link your ad accounts to GA4 for this data to appear correctly.

Paid Social

What it means: Similar to Paid Search, this is traffic from paid advertisements on social media platforms (e.g., boosted posts on Instagram or lead generation ads on LinkedIn).

Referral

What it means: This group includes visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website. This could be a news article that mentioned you, a partner company’s website, or a "best of" list where you were featured. High-quality referral traffic is great for SEO and often brings in a targeted audience.

Email

What it means: This channel tracks anyone who clicks a link in one of your email marketing campaigns. For this to work accurately and provide campaign-level detail, you absolutely need to use proper link tagging (more on that later!).

Display

What it means: This is traffic from display advertising campaigns, such as banner ads you run on other websites through networks like the Google Display Network.

How to Dig Deeper for More Granular Insights

The default channel report is great for a bird's-eye view, but the real magic happens when you start customizing it to answer more specific questions. Here are a few ways to do that.

Changing the Primary Dimension

The table in the Traffic Acquisition report has a dropdown menu in its top-left corner, likely set to "Session default channel group." This is the primary dimension, which controls how the data is grouped. Clicking on it opens up a world of more detailed views.

These are some of the most useful options:

Session source / medium: This is a classic and highly useful dimension. It combines where the visitor came from (the source) with how they got there (the medium). Examples include "google / organic," "facebook.com / referral," or "newsletter / email."
Session source: This shows you only the source (the specific website or platform), such as "google," "bing," or "linkedin.com."
Session medium: This reveals the general category of traffic, such as "organic," "cpc" (cost-per-click, or paid ads), or "referral."
Session campaign: If you're using campaign tracking tags, this dimension will show you the results broken down by each specific campaign, like "summer_promo_2024" or "influencer_pilot."

Adding a Secondary Dimension

But what if you want to cross-reference two variables? You can add a secondary dimension to slice your data even further. Simply click the blue "+" icon next to the primary dimension dropdown.

For example, you could set your primary dimension to Session source and add a secondary dimension of Landing page + query string. This combination shows which specific pages on your site visitors from different sources landed on first. You could cross-reference a campaign with the user's country or device category.

Using the Filter Bar

At the top of the report, there is a search bar with the label "Search report content." This is your filter. You can use it to hone in on just the data you care about. For example, if you wanted to see all social media traffic, you could filter by "Social" to include both "Organic Social" and "Paid Social." You could also search for a specific domain name (like "facebook") to isolate all traffic originating from there, whether it's referral, paid, or organic.

Putting it into a Practical Example

Spot a Trend: While looking at the main Traffic acquisition report, you notice a surprising increase in the "Referral" channel this month.
Isolate the Source: You change the primary dimension to "Session source" to see which exact websites are sending this traffic. You find that toptechblog.com is suddenly your number one referrer.
Find the Context: You add "Landing page + query string" as a secondary dimension. You see that all traffic from that blog is directed to your post titled "10 Productivity SaaS Tools for Remote Teams."
Analyze Performance: Looking across the columns, you see that these visitors have a very high engagement rate and trigger many "trial_signup" conversions. This is high-quality traffic.
Take Action: With this insight, you can reach out to Top Tech Blog to discuss collaborations, thank them for the mention, or sponsor a post to amplify the success.

Don't Forget UTM Parameters!

A quick but critical final point is the importance of Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters. These are simple tags you add to your URLs that send precise information back to Google Analytics. They tell GA4 how to categorize a click from your Mailchimp newsletter as "email" instead of "Direct."

This is vital for every link you control, whether in emails, social profiles, ads, or QR codes. When creating a link with tools like Google's Campaign URL Builder, you can specify the source, medium, and campaign. This helps differentiate traffic from an Instagram bio link versus an Instagram ad.

Final Thoughts

Knowing exactly where your audience is coming from is the foundation of any successful digital marketing strategy. By routinely exploring the Traffic acquisition report in Google Analytics, you shift from gut feelings to data-backed decisions. You'll be able to allocate your budget and efforts where they will have the most impact on your business goals.

We understand that pulling reports from Google Analytics, ad platforms, your CRM, and e-commerce tools can be time-consuming. That's why we built Graphed. Our goal is to make it effortless to connect all your data sources and simply ask for what you need in plain English. Instead of digging through GA4 reports, you can ask, "Which channels drove the most conversions last month?" and see an instant, real-time dashboard answering your question with no manual work.