What is Acquisition in Google Analytics?

The Acquisition reports in Google Analytics are your window into exactly where your website traffic is coming from. Forget guessing - this is where you get the hard data on what’s working. This guide will walk you through the key acquisition reports in Google Analytics 4, explain the essential metrics, and show you how to use this information to make smarter marketing decisions.

Why Acquisition Data is a Game-Changer

Tracking traffic acquisition isn’t about vanity metrics or simply watching the numbers go up. It’s about understanding the return on your effort and investment. Effective acquisition analysis helps you answer critical business questions like:

• Which digital marketing channels are sending the most valuable visitors?
• Is the time and money I’m spending on Facebook Ads actually leading to sales?
• Which blog posts or referral partners are driving the most engaged traffic?
• Are my SEO efforts paying off with high-quality organic visitors?
• Which email campaigns are converting browsers into buyers?

Without this data, you’re essentially marketing in the dark. You might be pouring your budget into a channel that brings in tons of clicks but no conversions, while a less-trafficked channel could be quietly delivering your most profitable customers. The Acquisition reports illuminate this entire process, turning raw data into a clear roadmap for growth.

How to Find Acquisition Reports in Google Analytics 4

Getting to your acquisition data in GA4 is straightforward. Once you’re logged into your Google Analytics property, just follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the left-hand menu and click on Reports (the icon that looks like a bar chart).
2. Under the "Life cycle" section in the reports navigation, click to expand the Acquisition tab.
3. You will see several reports listed, with the main two being Traffic acquisition and User acquisition.

These two reports form the foundation of traffic analysis in GA4, and understanding their core difference is essential.

The Key Reports: Traffic Acquisition vs. User Acquisition

At first glance, these two reports seem very similar, but they answer two distinctly different questions. The difference lies in what they attribute traffic to: the user or the session.

User Acquisition Report: The First Impression

The User Acquisition report tells you how people discovered your website for the very first time. It’s based on a "first-user touch" model. Think of it as answering the question: "How did we initially acquire this user?"

This report is perfect for understanding which channels are best for brand discovery and top-of-funnel marketing. If you’re running a broad awareness campaign on social media, for example, you can use the User Acquisition report to see how many new users that campaign brought to your brand, regardless of how they returned later.

Traffic Acquisition Report: The Current Visit

The Traffic Acquisition report, on the other hand, is all about what brought a user to your site for a specific session. It’s based on a "session-based" model and answers the question: "How did the visitor arrive for this particular visit?"

This is often the go-to report for day-to-day performance marketing analysis. Did someone click a link in your weekly email newsletter to visit your site today? The Traffic Acquisition report will credit that session to "Email." If that same user returns tomorrow by typing your URL directly into their browser, that new session will be credited to "Direct." This report helps you understand what prompts repeat visits and which channels are effective at re-engaging your audience.

Decoding Your Traffic: Key Dimensions and Metrics

When you open an acquisition report, you'll see a table filled with various terms. To make sense of it all, you need to understand the foundational dimensions and metrics GA4 uses to classify your traffic.

Source and Medium: The "Where" and the "How"

Source and Medium are the most granular and important dimensions for understanding your traffic. They work together to give you a precise picture of a visit's origin.

• Source: The specific place a user came from. Think of it as the name of the website or platform. Examples include "google," "facebook.com," "bing," or the name of an email newsletter ("spring-newsletter").
• Medium: The category or type of traffic. Think of it as the general method a user used to get to you. Examples include "organic," "cpc" (cost-per-click), "referral," and "email."

Here are some of the most common source/medium combinations you'll see:

• google / organic: Traffic from users clicking on a non-paid search result in Google.
• bing / organic: Traffic from users clicking on a non-paid search result in Bing.
• google / cpc: Traffic from users clicking on a paid Google Ad (Cost-Per-Click).
• facebook.com / referral: Traffic from users clicking a non-paid link on Facebook.
• linkedin.com / cpc: Traffic from users clicking a paid ad on LinkedIn.

Pro Tip: You can take control of your source and medium tracking by using UTM parameters for all your marketing campaigns. These are short tags you add to your URLs that tell Google Analytics exactly how to categorize the traffic, giving you much cleaner and more reliable data.

Default Channel Grouping: The Big Picture

While source/medium is specific, Google Analytics consolidates these combinations into broader, more readable categories called Default Channel Groupings. This gives you a high-level view of your marketing mix.

• Organic Search: Unpaid traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo.
• Paid Search: Traffic from PPC campaigns on search engines (e.g., Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising).
• Direct: Users who typed your URL directly, used a browser bookmark, or arrived from a source that stripped tracking data.
• Referral: Traffic that came from clicking a link on another website (that isn't a search engine or known social media site).
• Organic Social: Unpaid traffic from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
• Paid Social: Traffic from paid advertising campaigns on social media.
• Email: Traffic from links clicked in email campaigns.
• Display: Traffic from display advertising campaigns, including the Google Display Network.

Key Metrics to Track Performance

Once you understand where your traffic is coming from, the next step is to measure its quality. Look beyond just volume and focus on these engagement and conversion metrics:

• Users: The total number of unique individuals who visited your site.
• Sessions: The total number of visits. One user can have multiple sessions.
• Engaged sessions: The number of visits that lasted longer than 10 seconds, included a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews. This is GA4's improved replacement for bounce rate.
• Engagement rate: The percentage of sessions that were considered "engaged." A higher rate generally indicates higher-quality traffic.
• Conversions: The number of times users completed a valuable action on your site, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or submitting a contact form. This is arguably the most important metric.

How to Use Acquisition Data to Make Better Decisions

Armed with this knowledge, you can now start analyzing your data to find actionable insights.

Which channels drive the most valuable users?

High traffic doesn’t automatically mean high value. To find out which channels are actually adding to your bottom line, go to the Traffic Acquisition report.

1. By default, it will be sorted by Users or Sessions.
2. Click on the table header for Conversions or Total revenue (if you have e-commerce tracking set up) to re-sort the data.

You may be surprised to find that a channel with less traffic, like Organic Search, is generating far more valuable conversions than a high-traffic channel like Organic Social. This insight tells you where to double down on your efforts.

How are my specific marketing campaigns performing?

If you're using UTM parameters to track campaigns, you can easily check their performance.

1. In the Traffic Acquisition report, click the small blue "+" icon next to the "Session default channel group" dimension.
2. A menu will pop up. Select "Traffic Source" and then choose Session campaign.

This adds a secondary column to your table, showing you the performance of each specific campaign tag. You can now easily compare your "summer-sale-2024" campaign against your "influencer-collab-april" campaign to see which delivered better results.

What's the Deal with "Direct" Traffic?

Often, you'll see a large amount of traffic categorized as "Direct." While this does include people typing your URL directly, it often acts as a digital junk drawer for traffic that Google Analytics can't attribute elsewhere. This can happen when:

• Tracking parameters are stripped from links shared in desktop email clients (like Outlook).
• Users click links from secure (HTTPS) sites to non-secure (HTTP) sites.
• Links are shared via text messages or messaging apps, which don't pass referrer information.
• Your marketing campaigns are not properly tagged with UTM parameters.

You can't eliminate Direct traffic entirely, but you can minimize it by being diligent with your campaign tagging. The cleaner your data, the more confident you can be in your decisions.

Final Thoughts

Understanding your Acquisition reports is the pathway to building a smarter, data-driven marketing strategy. When you move beyond simple traffic counts and focus on the sources and channels that drive engagement and conversions, you unlock the ability to effectively optimize your budget and your efforts for maximum impact.

Pulling these reports is a fantastic start, but combining data from Google Analytics with your ad platforms, CRM, and e-commerce store to get a full picture often turns into hours of manual work. This is exactly why we created Graphed. We connect to all your marketing and sales sources in one place, allowing you to build real-time dashboards and get answers using simple, conversational language - like asking, "Which campaigns drove the most Shopify revenue last quarter?" We automate the reporting so you can get back to doing the strategic work that grows your business.