Understand how Google Analytics reports reveal where users come from, what they do on your site, and how they move toward conversion. This overview clarifies the differences between user acquisition and traffic acquisition and explains how to interpret the metrics that matter most.
Key Insights
- Audience, acquisition, behavioral, and conversion reports each provide unique insights. Audience reports highlight user demographics and behavior, acquisition reports show how visitors arrive on the site, behavioral reports reveal on-site activity like bounce rate and time on page, and conversion reports track actions tied to marketing goals such as purchases or form submissions.
- User acquisition focuses on individual users’ first interaction sources, while traffic acquisition accounts for all site visits regardless of user identity, allowing marketers to gauge both reach and engagement across campaigns and channels like organic search, direct traffic, and referrals.
- This article also explains the use of advanced metrics such as lifetime value, engaged sessions (defined as sessions lasting more than 10 seconds or involving multiple page views or conversions), and the analysis of acquisition cohorts to track long-term user behavior and revenue impact.
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Now, what about audience reports? Summarize audience metrics, including the number of sessions, users, page views, and bounce rate. Take a look at the demographic, geographic, and behavioral. We'll see what that means.
Acquisition reports summarize how users are acquiring website traffic, and we looked at that across channels such as organic search, paid search, socials, direct traffic, referrals, and it's an overview. They break it by channels, by campaigns, by referrals, which are referring sites. Behavioral reports offer insights into the use of behavior, including page views, average time on page, bounce rate, and exit rate.
Includes an overview, site content, site speed, and site search, right? We'll look at that. And then conversion reports track website conversion events for key marketing objectives. You know, is it bread and butter? You mean your goal for sales, for average order values, so all the ecommerce metrics, enrollment metrics, anything that lives out relating to conversion could also be form downloads, you know, any, you know, event that is considered a conversion on the website.
All right, so let us look at the actual report again. So this was the real time. Now let's look at the life cycle, right? We saw, we see acquisition, engagement, monetization, retention.
So what do we mean by acquisition? It's where the traffic came from, right? We were seeing some of these reports in the snapshots that we were looking at, and it breaks it down as this is real-time, you know, the countries they come from, new users by first primary channel group. We discussed that the first time they came, they came from direct, from organic search, paid search, or from a cross-network link on another Google website. It could be the merch store.
It could be YouTube, which Google owns, or any of the thousands of websites that Google is affiliated with. Referral to a site. So again, you know, it's different channel groups, email.
That primary channel group versus first user, you know, so it breaks it down in different ways. And you could change it for any one of these. I want to look at medium, or source and medium, where it came from, and how it got there.
Remember that? So it came from direct, Google, and came organic at Google, CPC, right? And then sessions by campaigns, right? You can look at the seeds of various campaigns they have run. So they have the experiment bug, evergreen, a couple of evergreen merch ones. So they have different campaigns that they're tracking, and you can see how many sessions are coming from each of those.
And here's another ecommerce-related. The value of, let's just actually provide the definition. For each new user, analysts can calculate the sum of purchase events and earnings events during the first 120 days of app usage, the lifetime value.
So this is looking at lifetime value based upon projections about once you've acquired that person, what is likely to be the value that they offer, you know, the brand. Because you can also break down sessions to sessions and engage sessions, right? Engage sessions are ones in which they did at least one action or stayed on for longer than 12 seconds, or, actually, maybe it's 10 seconds. All right, it's 10 seconds.
I think I've been saying nine seconds, but less than longer than 10 seconds, or had a conversion event, or had two or more screen or page views, meaning they went to at least one other page, right? So you can look at engage sessions versus regular sessions for each of the sources that it came from, right? So it came from Bing, came from Google, came from a newsletter. So you're really digging down into, you know, where, how, how you're acquiring your traffic. Okay, so that's the overview.
Then you can break it down into more detail in each of these different categories. User acquisition, again, looking at the channels that people have come from, and you always have the option to, you know, determine what the channel you're looking for, the group, the medium, the source. So the difference between user acquisition and traffic acquisition is that user acquisition counts each person, not the total visits.
So there might be a hundred people visiting your website in a time period. That's your users. But you might have 500 visits, right? Because they on average visit it five times.
Some people two times, some people 10 times, some people one time. So that would be your traffic acquisition. And you can look at your traffic acquisition along all the same lines as what we were just looking at.
Let's go a little bit slow. And here you have some insight. You see the little stars there.
On September 25th, 2025, direct sessions spiked to around 8,000, a sharp increase from the expected. It's huge. Went from 1.1 thousand to 8,000.
This pattern is most salient among sessions with the session source direct or Chrome browser, right? So it's giving you some very detailed information, which may or may not, you know, provide some, you know, enlightenment. Increasing week over week from, you know, and explaining the increase. And then sessions from the United States, right? And then you see the key drivers.
Again, it's going to be customized, you know, to the situation as to what they show you. And it's providing more information, which will be a lot more relevant to those who are marketing Google, you know, this particular brand, than it would be to us. Not knowing the intricacies of their campaign strategy and all those good things.
Let's go down. Right, so it's providing that information again for all the different channels. And you can switch that up to the different ones.
But now it's doing it by total sessions, not users. So that is the difference, right? I just want to point out that clarification. All right, so those are really the two primary reports, you know, in terms of the traffic acquisition, where they come from, how they get there from the standpoint of users and from the standpoint of total traffic, right? You can also look at acquisition cohorts, meaning people who came in from the same, you know, at the same time, and you could track their revenue and transaction activity on the website, right? So again, the most frequent, you know, or probably the most relevant ones, again, are the user acquisition and traffic acquisition, but you can also break it down to acquisition cohorts as well as lead acquisition.