Acquisition reports overview (5:32) Video Lecture | Google Analytics: For Beginners - Data & Analytics

“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.