A Guide to Understanding Acquisition Reports in GA4

Understanding customer acquisition has been one of the primary use-cases for Google Analytics for about as long as GA has existed. There’s a good chance that if you’re diving into Google Analytics 4 (GA4), it’s because you’re trying to find opportunities to improve campaign performance, understand how various marketing channels work together to contribute to the business, and use the insights you’re gaining from your data to optimize the performance of marketing as a whole. In this blog post, we’ll take you through a full overview of GA4’s “Acquisition” reports, to get you feeling comfortable with what they have to offer, and how they vary from the previous version of GA — Universal Analytics (UA).

Introduction to Acquisition Reports in GA4

Acquisition Reports in GA4 can help you understand the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, identify high-performing channels, and optimize acquisition strategies for better results. GA4 offers a streamlined and user-centric approach to acquisition tracking, focusing in particular on conversion and engagement data, while also leveraging machine learning and advanced modeling techniques to provide deeper insights into user behavior across multiple touchpoints.

Let’s explore each Acquisition Report type in GA4

Overview Report

The Overview Report in GA4 provides a high-level summary of your website or app’s acquisition performance. It offers key metrics such as total sessions, new users, and conversion rates, giving you a quick snapshot of the overall acquisition landscape. The report itself doesn’t provide a lot of depth in the data, but it’s not really meant to. The Overview Report can let any user of the platform keep a pulse of acquisition performance.

Analysts can use the Overview Report as a means to monitor acquisition performance. It includes channel and source / medium session & user volumes, as well as a real time reporting, to answer the question around what’s going on with your site or app right now. The Overview Report by its very nature provides a brief/general summary of your acquisition data within the given time frame; it gives you places to start looking deeper.

Marketers can leverage the Overview Report to get a sense of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns across different channels.

Executives can gain quick insights into the overall health of your acquisition efforts and track progress towards key business objectives. For 10,000 foot questions that need quick answers, the Overview Report is a fast way to understand or communicate performance metrics.

User Acquisition Report

The User Acquisition Report in GA4 provides detailed insights into the sources and mediums through which users are acquired. It breaks down acquisition channels into categories such as organic search, direct traffic, referral, paid search, social, and email, allowing analysts to identify the most effective channels for driving traffic and conversions. You can use the out-of-box channels that Google defines, as well as any custom channels you have defined. Read our blog post for more details on GA4’s custom channel groups.

The report exclusively reports on First User dimensions, meaning whether it’s a channel, campaign or source, the data reports on the value that first brought a user to the site. Its relative accuracy can be tricky though, as cookie deletion and deprecation can change that a users’ first “true” channel over time. That doesn’t mean you can’t derive insights from the report, but better to pull insights with that caveat in mind. 

Analysts can dive deeper into the User Acquisition Report to analyze the performance of individual acquisition channels. Identify which channels are driving the highest-quality traffic and contributing the most to conversions and site engagement, in the context of what brought users to the site for the first time. 

Marketers can use first user campaigns or first user Google-ads dimensions to evaluate the performance of their marketing efforts in the context of which marketing efforts are first bringing users to the site. Additionally, they can identify which channels are delivering the best ROI and double down on those strategies. Executives can gain a comprehensive understanding of where their website or app’s traffic is coming from and which first-user channels are driving the most valuable users. Use this insight to make informed decisions about resource allocation and prioritize marketing initiatives that have the greatest impact on business outcomes.

Executives can gain a comprehensive understanding of where their website or app’s traffic is coming from and which first-user channels are driving the most valuable users. Use this insight to make informed decisions about resource allocation and prioritize marketing initiatives that have the greatest impact on business outcomes.

Traffic Acquisition Report

The Traffic Acquisition Report in GA4 provides insights into the specific sources of traffic coming to your website or app at the session level. It’s near-identical to the User Acquisition report, but dimensions are session-scoped. This report would closest reflect the Acquisition Channels/Campaign/Source & Medium reports from UA. 

The use cases for this report would be the same as the User Acquisition report, but its focus would be on most recent visits, rather than first visits. Or in other words, it would answer questions around what channels, sources or campaigns were successful at driving users to your site or app most recently, rather than what originally brought them to the site.

Comparing GA4 and Universal Analytics Acquisition Reports

1. User-centric measurement: GA4 includes a focus on acquisition at the user-level, in addition to the session-level, allowing for a robust answer to how customers are arriving to a site or app.
2. Enhanced cross-device tracking: Given GA4’s ability to combine web and app data, it offers solid cross-device tracking capabilities, allowing businesses to better understand how users land on their digital properties across multiple devices or platforms.
3. Report Restructuring: GA4 offers many of the same reports that UA did, they’re just organized differently. Where previously different dimensions were effectively organized into their own reports, GA4 organizes its reports under attribution logic, and allows you to select the dimensions you need via a drop-down menu. (whether that be campaign, channel, source or medium, or Google Ads details). It’s ultimately a better way to compartmentalize the data in these reports, and reduces redundancy.
4. Search Console Reports: These still exist in GA4, they’re just not set up to appear automatically. You’ll need to first connect your Search Console account with the associated GA4 account, then publish the reports from the library. You can follow the set-up process using this Google walk-through documentation.

Conclusion

GA4’s Acquisition reports offer a comprehensive suite of tools for analyzing and reporting on user acquisition efforts. Whether you’re an analyst, marketer, or executive, these reports provide valuable information to help you optimize marketing strategies, drive conversions, and achieve business objectives. It’s tempting to look at the acquisition reports  offered in GA4, compare it against the volume of reports in UA, and think that they’re not as comprehensive, but the reality is that while the reports are organized differently, they offer much the same  in terms of data and insights. Now that you’re familiar with the “out-of-the-box” Acquisition reports, take some time to get familiar with GA4’s even more powerful analysis tool: Explorations.