Acquisition report within Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool that you can use to track statistics for your website. There are many other options that you can also use for this purpose. However, thanks to the integration of other Google tools such as AdSense, Ads and Search Console, Google Analytics remains the default option for many website administrators.

Setting up and installing Google Analytics is simple and can be enabled with a single piece of JavaScript in your header.

If you want to know how to do this for your website, you can check out our previous article on how to do this. However, as a novice webmaster, you may find yourself at a loss for words when faced with the many features of Google Analytics. In this blog post, you'll learn how to see where your visitors are coming from. And how you can use this to get the most out of your website!

Viewing the acquisition report

To view the Acquisition report in Google Analytics, navigate via the main menu to: Reports -> Lifecycle -> Acquisition -> Traffic Acquisition In this report you will see the total traffic that has come to your website in the selected time period; the other reports you see in the same header are mainly related to new users.

In this report you can see the most common sources of traffic to your website. In this example, it is a content website that mainly focuses on and markets Google search results and social media sources.

This report is broken down into Organic Search, which is the natural results from users coming to your website via Google (and other search engines) search results. Organic Social, i.e. the natural results from social media channels. Direct, i.e. visitors who come from social media or navigate directly to your website. Unassigned, visitors that do not fall into one of these sources, and Referral, where visitors come from third party websites that are not tracked by social media.

Enhance the report with meaningful information

The above report roughly shows you where your website visitors are coming from. You can expand this report even further by selecting the following option in the ribbon. Session source and medium

Instead of the organic search, you can then see specifically where your visitors are coming from. In this example, the organic search is broken down further into Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Qwant.

And the other sources are also explained in more detail as to where they come from. Another metric to keep an eye on is the engagement that certain sources have. You can have a lot of visitors from a certain source, but if these visitors don't even stay on your website for a second, then you either know that something is going wrong on the website. Or that it's most likely bot traffic.

Take action with this information

Of course it's nice to look at this report, but the point is to take action.

With the information gained, it's then possible to break down which tactics are most successful and where the opportunities still lie. If, as in this example, your traffic is mainly coming from organic search traffic but social media is lagging behind, then more time and energy should often be put into social media channels. Of course, this should not be at the expense of your content production, which generates the most traffic.

AI is also a solution to reduce the workload. You can turn existing content into a social media post within seconds, which you can make live immediately without having to make many adjustments. You can also choose to invest in running ads on both Google and social media - with the right tactics, you can set up an effective campaign for any budget. This will get you faster results than natural or organic methods in almost all situations. So if you have a marketing budget, you should definitely look into it.

Of course, keep in mind that once you stop the ads, the traffic may disappear as well. So take stock of the acquisition report and see where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and try not to rely too much on one traffic source.

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