This chapter was last updated in August 2021, refreshed content on GA4 is coming soon...
Understanding where your users are coming from on the internet is useful when trying to track the value of your marketing. Acquisition reports can show you how users are finding/ navigating to your website.
In the overview you will be able to see, at a glance, the breakdown of your site traffic by marketing channel. In this view you can also see site users and conversion rates by day.
This highly visual report can help you see the channels that bring in the most traffic (acquisition), best engagement (behavior), and most conversions (conversions). It is important to note the defaults in this view, though.
Acquisition shows you the number of users, so the largest bar on the graph is driving the most traffic. The behavior section of the table is defaulted to show you the bounce rate. In this instance, the largest bar on the graph has the HIGHEST bounce rate, which is not necessarily a good thing. The conversions section, by default, shows the conversion rate. While the largest bar may have the highest conversion rate, it’s important to take into consideration how much traffic is actually attributed to that channel. If there were only two sessions and one converted, the conversion rate would be really high for a source that only led to one conversion.
In short, the ideal channel would have a large acquisition bar, small behavior, and large conversion bar. Or you could just change the selected behavior metric to either pages/ session or average session duration so that you could look for all large bars.
Find which marketing channels drive the most traffic.
Determine how audiences from different marketing channels are interacting with your site. If you find a certain channel is leading to poor engagement, you may want to evaluate the message going out on that channel or where those users are landing on the site.
Find the most qualified and highest converting marketing channels. These are the channels you are going to want to invest in moving forward.
To get a more granular look at how your different marketing efforts are performing, you may take a look at the Source/Medium view. This will tell you, more specifically, where your audience is coming from on the internet.
Some of the most common sources are:
Direct, meaning the users either typed your URL into their browser or they copy and pasted the URL into their browser.
Google/Facebook/etc.
T.co (Twitter)
Popular mediums include:
Organic — non-paid traffic from search engines
Referral — traffic from other websites
Social — Google identified social media platforms (note, many social media sites are grouped into referral traffic)
In this view you will see organic traffic separated from paid, which domains referred traffic to you and so much more.
Much like the acquisition overview report, this report can be used to better understand how each audience interacts with your website. This is especially helpful for those who want to know how their ads are performing and whether or not the traffic they are driving is actually qualified.
This report can also be used to better understand where each audience you serve is in the marketing funnel. For example, when looking at the report below, you will see that not many people came from Dealspotr, but the ones that did were at the bottom of the funnel — they were return users looking for a reason to buy right away.
For the same client, when looking at their Twitter visits, we can see that their social audience is more mid-funnel. They come to the website and hang out for a while, but they don’t tend to convert.
Identify where each of your marketing sources are in the marketing funnel and strategize on how to leverage that source to either move people further down the funnel or grow the strategy’s reach.
Determine whether or not you are sending the right people to your website by analyzing if they are staying on the site.
Determine which marketing strategies to invest in and which to pull investments from based on the return on investment of the strategy.
There are also options to track your Search Console, Google Ads, and Social traffic in the Acquisition section of Google Analytics. While these reports may take a bit longer to set up, Google Analytics will walk you through any set up necessary to start tracking that data. This really allows you to track how each of your marketing campaigns are performing.
Acquisition reports are some of the most telling reports for marketers. They can help you shape your marketing strategy moving forward when used correctly.