Welcome
to the Google analytics tutorial series I'm Matt Landers and in this tutorial we'll learn about how
Google analytics uses traffic sources to tell us how we're acquiring users on our website or app
users land on your website or app from a variety of places including advertising
campaigns search engines and social networks analytics categorizes where your users are
coming from through traffic sources including Source medium campaign and channel group
each provides a slightly different way of looking at where users are coming from
Source refers to the specific place that referred user traffic for example if users
land on your website after a Google search then the source would be Google
if a user lands on your website from a newsletter then the source might be email and if the user
lands on your website by directly entering the URL then the source would be direct medium refers to
the type of referral for example if the user lands on your website after a Google search then the
medium would be organic but if they land on your website after clicking a Google ad then the median
would be CPC or cost per click campaign refers to the name of the marketing campaign responsible for
referring the user these come from you and your linked ads accounts or other marketing tools
finally Channel group refers to the predefined categories of your website's traffic sources you
can learn more about each definition through the help center link in the video description
for example if users land on your website after a Google search then the channel group would
be organic search each of these traffic sources enable you to see where your traffic originates
the method by which users arrive at your site and app and the specific marketing efforts you use to
drive that traffic ultimately this will help you figure out which marketing efforts are working and
which ones need additional refinement each type of traffic source is surfaced in Google analytics
through a traffic Source Dimension you'll find a source Dimension a medium Dimension and so on
when you start getting into your reports you'll notice that traffic Source Dimensions sometimes
include the prefix first user or session these two help you understand what data you're looking at
let's back up and talk about how Google analytics is organized
you can think of users sessions and events in a hierarchy first you have a bunch of
users and each user visits your website or app for periods of activity called sessions a user
may visit your website or app on one day and then visit again the next day before making a purchase
within each session a user will trigger a number of events so you can think of the hierarchy where
each user has one or more sessions and in each session the user will trigger one or more events
each traffic Source Dimension has a scope meaning that it describes where a user came from where
a session came from or where it triggered conversion again came from and these are going
to be different sometimes for example a user goes your eCommerce website for the first time through
a Google Search and clicks it around and then leaves in this case the user and session both
started from search however let's say the user comes back to your website the next day through
a bookmark to link and purchases a product in this case the way you acquire the user initially
will be different from how you acquired the most recent session analytics separates these kinds of
information into different scopes anytime you see a dimension with first user it means it describes
how you initially acquired that user this won't change during the lifetime of the user anytime you
see a dimension with session it means it describes how you acquire the user for a particular session
this will change for each session that the user creates when they return to your website or app
and if you just see the traffic Source it means it refers to the session in which a
conversion event was triggered why is this useful it's useful to know where brand new
top of the funnel users are coming from and separately it's useful to know how effectively
you're able to re-engage your users so that they keep coming back and you're able to retain them
all right let's jump into the acquisition report and see what it looks like all right I'm in the
property for the demo account the Google merchandise store if you don't know what
the demo account is you can check out a video that we have that shows you how to get access
to the demo account and start playing around with it but it's basically an account for the Google
merchandise store which is an online e-commerce shop and it's fully populated with data so it's
a good place to go if you want to play around with reports and see what everything should look like
so what we're going to do now is we're going to jump into the acquisition reports and see
what that looks like so we're going to go over to reports and then we'll go down under life
cycle and acquisition if we go to acquisition overview this has some summary cards from the
detailed report that shows you your new users and how you're acquiring them at a high level
let's go ahead and jump into a detailed report so first let's go to the user acquisition report
so this report shows you anything any new users that you've Acquired and how you've acquired them
so this isn't people that are returning these are new users whereas the traffic acquisition
report which we'll look at in a second shows you new users and returning users all right so what
can we see in here first we can tell that this is organized by the default Channel group and
that's because of what we have selected here but we can see most of our new users are coming from
direct we have some that are unassigned which we probably want to investigate that if you see that
that's that means they can't be categorized into a specific Channel group so there might be something
wrong with your campaigns or how you're driving traffic so you might want to check that out
but then we can come down here and choose a different dimension as well so we could choose
Source medium which is a common one that a lot of people might look at this helps you find out
where your travel is coming from we can see that a lot of our traffic is coming from direct which
means that people are typing that in the URL or in the browser we also have traffic coming from
Google CPC so these are ad campaigns Google search campaigns we have a Google organic so
just Google search and then clicking on a link and other various places as well
now we might want to analyze this data in different ways to tell how our campaigns
are performing or how we're acquiring different users based on different platforms let's say now
I'm not going to go into all the details of how to customize a report but let's look at one quick
way that we could analyze this data to try to understand better how we're getting our new users
so we could go ahead and create a comparison we'll select the device category
and I'll select mobile and tablet and I'll say apply now this is going to give me a comparison
now we'll see two different bar charts and different colors and one is for all of our
users and one is for mobile but we really want to compare mobile to desktop so let's go ahead and
add another comparison under device category and we'll do desktop ly and we're going to
go ahead and remove our all users so that we only see Mobile versus desktop and now we'll
see be able to see like differences on how we're acquiring our different users for instance we can
tell that we're getting lots of our mobile users from Google CPC but not very many desktop so this
might give us an opportunity to say hey how can we use our CPC campaigns to drive more desktop views
especially if we find that desktop views result in more conversions which is something we could look
at in our monetization report or our conversion reports and engagement all right so that's one
way that we can analyze this data and you'll notice that what you're seeing here is first
user default Channel group I think that this is important that we go and look at the traffic one
so we can see the distinction here if we go to the traffic report we'll also see the default Channel
group but it says session default Channel group so the difference is how did we acquire a new user
versus how do we get a user to come to the website how do we get that traffic not necessarily a new
user it could be a returning user so the traffic report shows all users if they're new or returning
and the user acquisition report shows new users how do we acquire that new user for the first time
all right and then you'll see these different dimensions session default Channel group first
user default Channel group Source medium campaign Etc in different reports that you can add as a
secondary Dimension so just understand what that means if you choose first user that means that
you're looking at the first time that you acquired that particular user and how you did that versus
session is how did I acquire this traffic how do I get this person to get to my site whether they're
new user or not all right so you can continue to play around with reports and slice and dice them
in different ways to help you analyze your campaigns whether it be paid or organic or
however you're driving traffic to your site and figure out if there's ways that you can optimize
that so these are really important reports for you to look at and to understand so that you can
make good business decisions on how you can drive more traffic and ultimately more sales all right
hopefully this gave you a good overview of the traffic acquisition reports and what the different
terminology is and what it means and if you have any questions please join our Discord Community
where you can ask a question that people in within the community will try to answer and
if they don't answer sometimes my team and other googlers will jump in and try to answer it as well
all right go out play with these traffic acquisition reports see what you can learn
about your data and your users and until the next video series happy measuring [Music]