What is an Acquisition Report in Google Analytics 4?

Thinking about where your website traffic comes from is the first step to making smarter marketing decisions. Google Analytics 4 gives you the tools to find these answers in its Acquisition reports, which show you the exact channels driving users to your site. This article walks you through where to find these reports, what they mean, and how you can use them to measure your marketing performance.

What Exactly is Traffic Acquisition in GA4?

Traffic acquisition analysis is all about understanding how people find your website or app. It answers the fundamental marketing question: "Which of our efforts are actually bringing visitors to our digital doorstep?" Were they searching on Google? Clicking through from a social media post? Following a link in an email newsletter? The Acquisition reports in GA4 are designed to give you this exact information.

If you're used to Universal Analytics (GA3), you'll notice a significant shift in GA4. The old model was primarily focused on sessions. GA4, however, adopts a more user-centric approach focused on users and events. This change provides a more holistic view of the user journey, starting from their first visit.

In practice, this means GA4 makes a critical distinction between how a user first discovered you and what brought them back for a subsequent visit. This is the core difference between the "User acquisition" and "Traffic acquisition" reports.

Locating the Acquisition Reports in GA4

Finding a specific report in GA4 can sometimes feel like a challenge, but the Acquisition reports are easy to access.

Just follow these steps:

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 section.
Under Life Cycle, click on Acquisition.
You will see a dropdown menu with three reports: Acquisition overview, User acquisition, and Traffic acquisition.

The Acquisition overview is a dashboard-style report that gives you a high-level summary of your traffic sources with key metrics. However, for a deeper analysis, you'll want to spend your time in the User acquisition and Traffic acquisition reports.

User Acquisition vs. Traffic Acquisition: What's the Difference?

At first glance, these two reports sound almost identical, but they answer two very different questions. Understanding the distinction is essential for accurate analysis.

User Acquisition Report

This report focuses on the very first touchpoint an individual user has with your website. It answers the question: "How did our new users discover us for the first time?"

The primary dimension in this report is "First user default channel group." This means it attributes all of that user's subsequent actions — sessions, conversions, revenue — back to the channel that originally brought them in.

Example: Someone is searching for "best project management software." They see your blog post in the Google search results, click on it, and visit your site for the first time. Later that week, they see one of your posts on LinkedIn and click through again. Their "First user default channel group" will always be Organic Search because that's how they first discovered you.

Traffic Acquisition Report

On the other hand, the Traffic acquisition report is all about the session level. It answers the question: "Which traffic sources brought users to our website for this specific session and why?"

The primary dimension for a specific session could be "Session default channel group."

Example: Reusing the same scenario but in a different context. A user found out about you through one of your social media posts, your business looks interesting to them, so they subscribe to your weekly newsletter. Then seven days later, that same user is going through their email on Sunday, gets one of your weekly letters, and lands back on your site for another visit or a purchase.

Their User acquisition source would be Social Media.
The Traffic acquisition source for that second session would be Email Marketing if you use UTM parameters for email-specific campaigns.

A Deep Dive into the Key Metrics in GA4 Acquisition Reports

When you open your acquisition reports, you'll see a table full of metrics. Here’s a breakdown of the most important ones and what they tell you:

Users: This is a summary view with a count of all types of users (new and returning) who came from one of your selected traffic sources and initiated a session on your website or app.
New Users: The number of people who landed on your website or app for the first time through a particular traffic source in the selected date period. This is an excellent way to gauge and track if any of your new or recent marketing efforts for brand awareness are producing the desired outcomes or not.
Engaged Sessions: A user's visit will be counted as an "engaged session" if the session lasted more than 10 seconds, the user created a particular conversion (which you can set up beforehand in GTM), or the website visitor goes to at least two other pages during the session.
Engagement Rate: This represents a calculation of the number of engaged sessions divided by the total sessions on your website. This has replaced Bounce Rate and is more useful for understanding user actions better.
Session Conversion Rate: This valuable metric measures the total of sessions within a user's visit that included at least one conversion by a certain traffic source, like organic or affiliate. If you want to gauge which of your campaigns performed a desired action, this is a valuable KPI or north star metric.
Conversions: The total amount of your configured goals that visitors complete. Examples of conversion events are making a purchase or filling out a lead generation form. You can set these events in your GA4 property to measure your desired marketing KPIs.
Total Revenue: If you're setting a conversion event for your e-commerce site and your main goal is to make a purchase, this KPI will track the total amount from purchases on your existing website, including total purchases and refunds initiated from your e-commerce site over a selected time period.

Understanding Default Channel Groupings

GA4 automatically sorts your incoming traffic into categories called "Default Channel Groupings." Knowing them is essential to better understand your and your team's analysis within GA4's Acquisition Reports.

Here are the most common Default Channel Groupings on GA4:

Direct: A visitor goes to the browser and types your exact URL domain name to directly access your site because they are already familiar with it, are returning users, or it came from dark traffic where Google doesn't know the specific traffic channel.
Organic Search: Any visitor who visits your website from search engine results such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. This represents your SEO efforts at work.
Organic Social: Any click that gets to you from an unpaid organic post from any social-specific platform like Reddit or Pinterest.
Paid Search: Clicks coming to your website from pay-per-click ads (PPC) from search engines like Google through your Google Ads campaigns or Bing Ads.
Paid Social: Visits that are a direct result of paid social media ads on any given existing social-specific platform, such as Facebook or X ads.
Affiliate Marketing traffic: Clicks or visitors from existing links from affiliate marketing partners.
Referral Traffic: Anyone who just visits your webpage by clicking through another given website or app not related to any social media or other search engines on their own.
Email: Any person that arrives on a site from your newsletters or email-specific campaigns.
Display ads: Visits coming from any display ad, like those running on Google's Display Network. This counts visits from your Display Network.

Some Practical Use Cases for This Traffic-Related Report

Let's imagine you have a blog where you provide information on marketing to grow other businesses. As a content marketer writing blog content, here’s a use case:

Finding the Pages That Perform Best by Traffic

Access the report by following the steps above.
Choose the Traffic Acquisition report to view session-by-session data.
Click to view the table with "Session default channel grouping" as the main dimension. You can edit the columns by clicking the pencil icon. Save the current view for future reference if needed by your team or company.
Add a “+” symbol to add a secondary dimension like "Landing Page and query string" to find potential content calendar ideas from new queries.

Final Thoughts

GA4's acquisition reports provide a deeper understanding of finding new ways to improve content pieces or ad campaigns by making informed decisions with better data. This will lead to improved business KPIs and business growth.

We created Graphed because we know how challenging it can be to find and gather useful data, often involving tedious manual processes or exporting data from Google and integrating it with other tools, like Google Sheets. With Graphed, you can request a report by simply asking for it to gain insights and track your company's KPIs by connecting your data sources on Graphed