Acquisition Reports

If you have ever wanted to know how website visitors get to your website, Acquisition Reports in Google Analytics is a great place to look!

There are a few sections of the Acquisition Reporting: Overview, All Traffic, Google Ads, Search Console, Social, and Campaigns.

The Overview page will show you how all of your channels are performing and how many visitors you have had over the range you have selected. You can change the data range at the top right by picking a date on the calendar or by typing in a new date and click Apply.

You can update the data to compare by choosing the Primary Dimension - this will update the data table and pie graph based on your choice:

Different Channels

Organic: Traffic that arrived to your website through unpaid searches - such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo search

Referral: Traffic that visited your site from somewhere other than a search engine

Email: Traffic that came from an email marketing campaign

Social: Traffic that comes from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Twitter, Reddit and more

Direct: Traffic from visitors that arrive directly to your website - this may be a link they typed in or clicked on, or a bookmark they have saved from previously visiting your website

Other: "Other" traffic is from a source that Google does not recognize within its default system

You can click on any of these channels to find more data. For example, you can click on Organic to see what keywords people searched that lead to your website, source (did they use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or another search engine?).  You can also see the data for Landing Pages - these are pages that your website visitors first "landed" on so you can determine if their search led them to your homepage or your blog page.

Please note, that by default, Google Analytics does not differentiate reporting for subdomains.  In order to see traffic for subdomains, we recommend setting up a filter. You can find instructions on how to do so here.