Goal:
Create a traffic acquisition channels report in Google Analytics 4.
Ideal Outcome:
Create a report that tells you the major different traffic channels for your site.
Prerequisites or requirements:
You need to have an active Google Analytics 4 account.
Why this is important:
GA4 provides a lot of insightful reports about your audience. Use the traffic acquisition channels report to understand the performance of your top pages and which acquisition channels they come from.
Where this is done:
Google Analytics 4.
When is this done:
After you’ve set up Google Analytics 4 on your site.
Who does this:
Marketing Manager, marketing consultant, or any person responsible for marketing strategy for your business.
Create the traffic acquisition channels report
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Sign in to your GA4 account with the right email address.
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Ensure that you are under the correct account that you would like to create the traffic acquisition channels report and click “Reports”
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Under “Business objectives”, go to “Generate leads” and then “Traffic acquisition”
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If you are new to GA4 reports, scroll down (below the graph) and you will see the “Default” channel group set by GA4.
Note: There are 3 types of channel groups available such as "Default", "Custom", and "Primary". The “Default” channel group is pre-defined by metrics such as organic search, direct, organic search, and referral. In the “Custom” channel group, however, the report is customized based on the business objectives and needs. On the other hand, the “Primary” channel group serves as your property's editable default channel group and is an active record of your property's data in alignment with channel grouping over time.
For a thorough explanation of each metric and the different groups, you may refer to this page here.
5. [Recommended for new users] For data display purposes and according to your preferences, you may consider adding a filter to your “Default” channel group such as demographics, geography, time, etc about your users.
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Click on the “+” and select the preferred filter.
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For instance, if “Country” is the preferred filter, this should appear as seen below:
Customize the report
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Make sure that the date range is within your preference before customizing the report and click the pencil icon:
2. Here, you will be able to customize the report data, filters, and charts for data visualization.
1. Filter data: Dimensions and metrics
Depending on your preferences you may choose to add or remove any primary dimensions and up to 12 metrics in the report. You may also arrange them in order, if necessary for data visualization. Click on the 3 dots or the button on the right to remove the dimension or metric for your report. Otherwise, click and drag on the 6 dots on the left to arrange them in order.
For instance, if you have a campaign running linked to a landing page and you would like to see all data provided by GA4, you may want to reorder them from “Session campaign” > “Sessions source/medium” > “Session source platform” and so on as your primary dimensions and select metrics such as “Users” > “Average engagement time per session” > “Engagement rate” etc.
Remember to click “Apply”.
After clicking “Apply”, the previously set dimensions and metrics will immediately apply to your report:
2. Build filters
Click on the “+ Add filter”
For demonstration purposes, this SOP shows a selected dimension of “Landing page + query string” that matches with a web page. Click “Apply” and this will automatically reveal the data based on the previously set primary dimensions and metrics.
3. Moving on to the data visualization in charts, you may choose your preferences accordingly by clicking on the below:
Save the report for quick access
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After customizing the report, ensure to click “Save” and choose either to save changes to the current report or as a new report:
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Rename this report accordingly and click “Save”.
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Go back to your dashboard and click “Library” under “Reports”. You should be able to see the saved report for quick access next time.
