“Acquisition” reports are located under the “Acquisition” section in the left-hand navigation.
You can use the Acquisition reports to compare the performance of different marketing
channels and discover which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions.
This can help you make better decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts.
Before we discuss Acquisition reports, it can be helpful to know how Google Analytics identifies
traffic sources for your website. When a user lands on your site, the Google Analytics tracking
code automatically captures several attributes (or dimensions) about where the user came
from. This includes the traffic medium, source, and marketing campaign name. You can think
of the medium as the mechanism that delivered users to your site. Some common examples of
mediums are “organic,” “cpc,” “referral,” “email,” and “none.” Let’s look
at these different types of mediums: “Organic” is used to identify traffic that arrived on
your site through unpaid search like a non-paid Google Search result. “CPC” indicates
traffic that arrived through a paid search campaign like Google AdWords text ads. “Referral”
is used for traffic that arrived on your site after the user clicked on a website other
than a search engine. “Email” represents traffic that came from an email marketing
campaign. And “(none)” is applied for users that come directly to your site by typing
your URL directly into a browser. In your reports, you will see these users as having a source
of “direct” with a medium of “(none)". “Source” provides more information about
the medium. For example, if the medium is “referral,” then the source will be the
URL of the website that referred the user to the site. If the medium is “organic,”
then the source will be the name of the search engine such as “google.” Under “All Traffic"
let’s look at the “Source/Medium” report in The Google Store Analytics account
using the dates August 1, 2015 through August 31, 2015. This shows the sources and their
respective mediums sending referrals, search engine traffic, and direct traffic to the
site. Notice that the default sort is users. To identify effective traffic sources, we
can look at the source/medium combinations with the most users, but that doesn’t necessarily
mean this was the best traffic. Ideally, traffic should be “high quality,” meaning that
users who arrive from a source engage with the website or complete a conversion. A good
indicator of traffic quality can be bounce rate. We can click into the comparison view
and select the metric “bounce rate” to compare bounce rate for each source/medium
combination to the site average. Sure enough, we can see that our YouTube traffic is bouncing
at a much higher rate than the site average. The Google Store may want to investigate to
make sure that YouTube traffic is landing on a page that’s valuable to those users.
If we want to see only the “organic” sources sending traffic to the site, we could type
“organic” into the filter. You can see that Google referred more traffic than any
other non-paid source and had a relatively low bounce rate compared to other sources.
This means that users arriving from Google Organic search are landing on highly relevant
pages. Now let’s compare the performance for all of our various Google marketing activities
that generated traffic by changing the filter to “google.” We can now see that organic
traffic was our biggest traffic source, followed by google/cpc, which represents paid search
traffic using Google AdWords. This is a great way to add context to your analysis and understand
which marketing activities are generating success for your business. There are other
ways to view which traffic sources bring the most engaged users to the site. Using the
“Channels” report, we could view traffic by channel, which bundles the sources together
under each medium. Traffic sources are automatically grouped into basic categories (or channels)
like Organic, Social, Direct, Referral, Display, etc. Clicking into each channel will break
out the individual sources for that channel. If you want to group your sources differently,
you can create your own channel groupings in Google Analytics. We’ll cover this more
in an advanced course. If you want to view your traffic organized by which sites have
linked to yours, you can look at the “Referrals” report. You can even click into individual
referrals to see which specific web pages link back to your site. If you want to understand
which specific pages of your site are being linked to, you can add a secondary dimension
of “landing page” to the report. This will show you which external sites are sending
traffic to each of your specific pages, and potentially offer you a source of new advertising
partnerships with those referring websites.