GA4 Traffic Sources

Source dimensions

• Source is the specific place that referred traffic, e.g. google, email, or direct
• Medium is the type of referrer, e.g. "organic", "paid search" or "CPC", "direct"
• Name would be the name of a marketing campaign responsible for referring the user
• Channel group refers to predefined categories of the website's traffic sources, e.g. "organic search" for searching through Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.

Traffic hierarchy

Organized first by users, then by individual sessions on the site for each user, and finally events within the sessions.

First user

First user refers to how a user was acquired on their first session on the site, ignoring traffic sources for any subsequent sessions.

For example, a visitor finds the site through a Google search. They bookmark the site, then leave. In the following days, they click on their bookmark to return to the site. We use first user to determine how the visitor was acquired originally.

Session

Events

Reports

First user acquisition

Reports > Acquisition > User acquisition

Here we're looking at how individual users first found the site.

Traffic acquisition

Here we're looking at sessions regardless of the users. So how both new users and returning users are finding the site.