The Acquisition section helps you understand how people find your website or app.
These reports are valuable because
they can help any business understand their investment in digital marketing.
From email, to social media, to search engine optimization,
these reports will help you identify which channels and tactics
are generating value for your business.
In this lesson we'll review:
how to understand all the different sources of traffic for your site and
how to find and analyze your marketing campaigns
Using the Acquisition reports, you can compare the performance of your various marketing
channels
to find out which sources send you the highest quality traffic.
This helps you make decisions about where to focus your advertising efforts.
Reports in the Acquisition section can be broken out by
channel,
source,
medium,
campaign,
keyword,
and more.
Let's start by taking a look at the All Traffic report.
The All Traffic report lists all of the sources sending traffic to your site,
including referrals, search engine traffic, and direct traffic.
This report is particularly helpful because you can identify your top performing sources,
regardless of whether they are search engines, sites or other referring sources.
For example, in the report, you see that google referred more traffic than any other source.
It has a medium of organic because these visits came from non-paid search listings.
The medium of cpc, for cost-per-click, on this other entry
tells us that this traffic came from paid search results.
The second most popular source of traffic was direct.
Direct traffic always has a medium of (none).
YouTube was the third largest source of traffic.
It has a medium of referral, which simply means that this traffic came from a link to
the our site
that was placed on a non-search engine site.
Remember, it is also possible to customize how traffic sources and mediums appear in
your reports
using campaign tagging.
Refer to the resources in this lesson for details on campaign tagging.
So what makes a good source of traffic for your site or application?
Looking at the highest traffic drivers is a start,
but it doesn't tell you whether the traffic was qualified.
In other words, did the traffic help you achieve the goals you've set for your site?
One easy indicator of quality is Bounce Rate --
the percentage of visits in which the person landed on your site,
but left without viewing any other pages.
In this report, although youtube.com sent a significant amount of traffic,
it has a 44% bounce rate.
By clicking the "compare to site average" icon and selecting a comparison metric,
you can see that this bounce rate is clearly an outlier from other traffic sources.
A bounce rate this high relative to the other traffic suggests that visitors from youtube
aren't finding what they're looking for when they land on the site.
Using the secondary dimension in this report can help deliver additional insight
about why the YouTube traffic isn't performing well.
Let's add a secondary dimension of "Landing Page" to this report
and then filter the report to only show the traffic that came from "youtube" as a referral.
As you can see now, the bounce rate for YouTube traffic
appears to largely depend on which landing page users are sent to.
By adding the secondary dimension you get more granular data
to identify site issues that may impact the performance of your campaigns
and other incoming site traffic.
If you have goals or ecommerce set up on your site,
you have a much wider range of metrics with which to assess performance.
By clicking on the Goal Set or Ecommerce tabs you can view which sources are driving important
conversions and purchases.
In this case, we're looking at metrics on the Ecommerce tab
and comparing each traffic source's ecommerce conversion rate with the site average.
Remember, by default, Google Analytics attributes a conversion or sale
to the campaign that most recently preceded the conversion.
For example, if a visitor clicks on an AdWords ad
and then later returns via a referral to purchase something,
the referral will get credit for the sale.
This information is important to keep in mind as you use the Acquisition reports,
since some traffic sources may be better at assisting conversions,
while others may be better at closing conversions.
Now, let's try switching the All Traffic report to show just the dimension "Medium."
With this report, you can analyze how particular types of traffic perform for your site in
general.
Similarly, the Channels report allows you to see your traffic source reporting rolled
up by category.
Analytics detects and categorizes many of the channels by default,
based on the source and medium of the incoming traffic,
but you also have the ability to customize how channels appear in this report by setting
your own rules.
Check out the resources in this section to learn more about how to customize channels.
Let's look at one last report in the Acquisition section -- the Campaigns report.
The campaigns report shows traffic for any incoming traffic you've assigned a campaign
name to.
Traffic from AdWords automatically has a campaign name assigned if you have enabled auto-tagging.
Any other non-AdWords campaigns must be manually assigned using campaign tagging.
With the Campaigns report, you can compare your various marketing efforts side-by-side.
If you use the same campaign name for many different sources,
you can segment the campaigns report by source or medium.
Using the "other" drop-down in the primary dimensions option,
you can also switch the Campaigns report to show you performance data by "Ad Content."
Remember, Ad Content is a dimension that you can set
to name the various ads you use as part of your campaigns.
With this report, you can determine which version of an ad
is most effective at driving high quality traffic to your site.
Check out the resources in this lesson
for more guidance on how you can use the reports in the Acquisition section.