Sep 21, 2023

Walkthrough: GA4 Tips - Acquisition Reports

Posted on Sep 21, 2023

There are two main categories for reporting in Google Analytics 4. These enable you to understand website user interactions and traffic sources.

Lifecycle reports consist of four types: Acquisition, Retention, Engagement, and Monetization.
User reports consist of two types: Demographics and Technology.

In this walkthrough, we’ll look in detail at Acquisition Reports to explore what brings users and traffic to your website.

Benefits of GA4 acquisition reports

These reports in GA4 are useful as they try to show the effect of top-of-funnel activity that brings prospective customers to your website to do their initial browsing. Universal Analytics didn’t show this data, as it was measuring site traffic or sessions; it would show user totals but not how they first visited the site. While there were some first user touchpoint data in the Multichannel Funnels report in Universal Analytics, the GA4 First User Acquisition reports are a lot more helpful for showing you the channels that introduce your website to your audience. With this information, you can plan more effective new customer acquisition campaigns.

Types of Acquisition Reports

Acquisition Overview allows you to access all standard reports and reports from other Google tools that you link to. These reports include:

Standard Reports: Accessed through the Overview section and in the left-hand menu
- User Acquisition: Use this report to see which channels and sources drive unique visitors to your website or mobile app.
- Traffic Acquisition/Sessions by Default Channel: Use this report to see which channels and sources drive sessions and traffic.
Reports for Linked Google tools: Accessed as widgets or tiles in the Overview section

Google Ads Report: Use this report to deep dive into Google Ads traffic, and campaign and keyword performance.
Organic Search Traffic: Use this report to better understand what content and landing pages are driving organic searches.
Organic Search Queries: Use this report to better understand what search queries and keywords are driving organic searches.

This content is available to Power Members only.

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Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.

Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.

Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.

Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.

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