A information to the Visitors Acquisition Report

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After almost a decade of utilizing Common Analytics for web site visitors evaluation, you in all probability have a reasonably good thought of the place it’s essential go to get the info you want. Perhaps you’d even take into account your self a GA reporting grasp.

Wish to understand how a lot visitors got here from natural search? No drawback. You possibly can pull that report in two seconds flat! Or, even higher, you’ve obtained it bookmarked.

However in the case of Google Analytics 4, issues appear and feel completely different. You could have no thought learn how to get began.

Don’t have any worry!

On this information, you’ll study

  • Find out how to entry Acquisition studies in GA4.
  • What the variations are between Consumer acquisition and Visitors acquisition.
  • Find out how to construct a number of the most helpful acquisition studies that you realize and love from Common Analytics in Google Analytics 4. 

The place to search out the GA4 Acquisition Studies

Acquisition studies stay underneath Studies > Lifecycle > Acquisition

You’ll instantly discover that there are literally two acquisition studies.

The Consumer acquisition report:

And the Visitors acquisition report:

Vital variations to bear in mind:

  • Consumer acquisition: the primary marketing campaign/supply/medium noticed for the person (or extra precisely, for the browser/cookie)
  • Visitors acquisition: the marketing campaign/supply/medium of the session – this will probably be most much like what you’re used to in Common analytics

Which one do you have to use?

That’s as much as you and the kind of evaluation you’re attempting to do (whether or not you wish to know what introduced the person to the location within the first place, or marketing campaign data for the most recent session that introduced somebody to your website).

On this information, we’ll study the Visitors Acquisition report.

Utilizing the Visitors Acquisition Report

When you choose the Visitors acquisition report, you’ll discover that the report defaults to the Default Channel Grouping view of information.

In UA, you may choose a Channels report back to get this view, or you may select to have a look at the “supply / medium” report straight. In GA4, you may get all of those views from one single desk. 

To take action, you may change the first dimension within the dropdown of the desk to change the dimension view. 

If you wish to rebuild the supply / medium report that all of us love from UA, it’s simple.

First, you’ll change the first dimension to supply and then you definately’ll add a secondary dimension (click on the + icon) of medium

*Be aware that as of this writing, there’s not a single major dimension for supply / medium, however there’s a secondary dimension for it. Hopefully, this can quickly be resolved within the GA4 reporting interface.

Should you’d wish to get somewhat fancier together with your knowledge evaluation, you may depart the first dimension set as is as Default channel grouping and add a secondary dimension of supply / medium.

It’s a pleasant view to see high-level Default channel grouping and the extra granular supply / medium breakdown collectively, providing you with the flexibility to simply scan and classify visitors into channels and distinct sources.

Just like Common Analytics, we are able to additionally filter a desk report in GA4.

For instance, when you’d wish to filter by Referral, you should utilize the filter field to slim down your knowledge outcomes. 

One vital distinction between GA4 and UA is that the filter you add right here will apply to each the first and the secondary dimensions within the desk.

So if the phrase “referral” exhibits up in both column, the row will probably be proven. In UA, the straightforward filter field solely impacted the first dimension, and you may add a sophisticated filter choice for the secondary dimension particularly. 

If you wish to know acquisition knowledge by touchdown web page, you may apply this identical methodology of including a secondary dimension of supply / medium to your fancy new touchdown web page report we lately constructed.

Should you haven’t executed it already, right here’s how one can simply construct your individual touchdown web page report in GA4. It’s a helpful software for search entrepreneurs.

Now you’re a GA4 acquisition grasp

That’s it! And it isn’t all that completely different from UA.

With somewhat observe, you’ll be pulling these acquisition studies together with your eyes closed. 


Opinions expressed on this article are these of the visitor writer and never essentially Search Engine Land. Employees authors are listed right here.


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About The Creator

Krista Seiden is the principal digital analytics marketing consultant and chief teacher with KS Digital, an analytics consultancy she based in 2019, serving to companies benefit from their investments in digital advertising and analytics. Beforehand, Krista was VP, product advertising and development at Quantcast. Previous to that, she was at Google for almost 7 years, the place she led product administration efforts throughout the Google Advertising Platform and served because the exterior evangelist for the Google Analytics suite of merchandise. Krista is a keynote speaker, practitioner, author on Analytics and Optimization, and passionate supporter of #WomenInAnalytics. You possibly can study extra about Krista and KS Digital over at KS Digital.