Where to Find the Google Analytics 4 Traffic Acquisition Report?

Finding your traffic sources in Google Analytics 4 feels like a bit of a scavenger hunt compared to the old Universal Analytics. If you're looking for the simple "Source / Medium" report you're used to, you'll notice it's been moved and renamed. This guide will show you exactly where to find the GA4 Traffic Acquisition report, explain the key metrics, and clarify its purpose so you can get back to analyzing what drives your website traffic.

First, A Quick Look Back at Universal Analytics

In Universal Analytics (UA), most of us lived in the Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium report. It was the go-to destination for a clear, straightforward breakdown of where your website traffic came from and which channels performed best. You could quickly see traffic from "google / organic," "facebook / cpc," or a specific newsletter campaign.

GA4 changes this structure by taking a more flexible, user-centric approach. While this is powerful, it makes finding that familiar session-level data a little less intuitive at first. Instead of one primary report, GA4 splits acquisition analysis into two main reports: User acquisition and Traffic acquisition. Understanding the difference is the first step to mastering GA4 reporting.

How to Find the GA4 Traffic Acquisition Report: Step-by-Step

The Traffic Acquisition report is your new home for analyzing session-based performance. It answers the question, "Which marketing channels are driving my website sessions?" Here’s how to locate it.

Log in to your Google Analytics 4 Property.
Navigate to the Reports Tab: On the left-hand navigation menu, click the "Reports" icon (it looks like a small chart).
Open the Life Cycle Collection: In the Reports menu, you'll see a few collections of reports. The one you need is "Life cycle." If it isn't already expanded, click on it.
Find the Acquisition Dropdown: Within the life cycle collection, click on "Acquisition." This will reveal a dropdown menu with the different acquisition reports.
Click on "Traffic acquisition": This is it! You've found the session-based acquisition report.

Pro-Tip: If "Acquisition" isn't visible in your left-hand menu, you may need to add it from the Library. Click "Library" at the bottom of the Reports navigation, find the "Life cycle" collection, click the three dots, and select "Publish." This will make the standard reports visible for easy access.

Understanding the Traffic Acquisition Report

Once you open the report, you’ll see a table of data that looks a bit different from the old Source/Medium report. By default, it’s organized by the "Session default channel group." Let's break down what you're looking at.

Key Dimensions (How Traffic is Grouped)

The primary dimension determines how your data is organized in the first column of the table. You can change this by clicking the dropdown arrow next to "Session default channel group."

Session default channel group: This is the default view. GA4 automatically groups your traffic into high-level categories like Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search, Organic Social, Display, and Referral based on its own rules. This is great for a big-picture overview.
Session source / medium: This is your classic Universal Analytics view. Selecting this option will show you the specific source (e.g., google, facebook.com) and the medium (e.g., organic, cpc, referral). This is the most granular and familiar view for many marketers.
Session source: Shows only the source of the traffic (e.g., google, youtube.com).
Session medium: Shows only the method of arrival (e.g., organic, cpc, referral). This is useful for comparing the performance of different types of channels, like paid vs. organic.
Session campaign: If you use UTM parameters to tag your campaigns (which you should!), this dimension shows you performance by campaign name (e.g., summer_sale_2024).

Key Metrics (What is Being Measured)

The columns in your report are the metrics, telling you what happened during the sessions from each channel.

Users: The total number of unique users (new and returning) who initiated sessions from that channel.
Sessions: This is the most important metric in this report. It's the total number of times your site was visited from a particular channel. A single user can have multiple sessions.
Engaged sessions: A session is counted as "engaged" if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews. This metric helps you filter out low-quality traffic and bounces.
Engagement rate: The percentage of sessions that were engaged (Engaged sessions ÷ Sessions). This has effectively replaced Bounce Rate as the primary engagement metric in GA4. A higher engagement rate is better, as it indicates visitors are finding your site useful.
Conversions: The count of conversion events (e.g., purchase, form_submission, sign_up) that occurred during sessions from that channel. You can filter the report for specific conversion events using the dropdown menu in the Conversions column header.
Total revenue: The total revenue from purchases attributed to sessions from that channel.

User Acquisition vs. Traffic Acquisition: What’s the Difference?

This is one of the most common points of confusion for those new to GA4. It is essential to understand the distinction to ensure you're looking at the right data to answer your questions.

Think of it this way:

The User Acquisition report tells you how people discovered you for the very first time.It answers the question: "Which channels are bringing brand new users to my website?" This report uses "first user" dimensions (e.g., First user default channel group, First user source / medium). The credit for the new user, and all their subsequent actions, is given to the channel that first brought them to you.

The Traffic Acquisition report tells you what drove a specific visit or session.It answers the question: "How did people get to my site for this visit?" It doesn't care if the user is new or returning. If a user returns to your site three times from three different channels, each of those channels gets credit for one session in this report.

A Practical Example

Imagine a user named Sarah is looking for a new pair of running shoes.

She first discovers your online store by clicking on a Facebook Ad. She browses but doesn't buy.
A week later, she remembers your store and searches on Google for your brand name, clicking an organic search result to visit your site again. This time, she finds the perfect pair and makes a purchase.
The following month, you send out an email newsletter with a new promotion, and she clicks the link to see what’s on sale.

Here’s how this activity would be reported:

User Acquisition Report: The "Paid Social" channel (from the Facebook Ad) gets credit for acquiring Sarah as a new user. The purchase and all other activity would be associated with her first touchpoint in this view.
Traffic Acquisition Report: This report would show three separate sessions: one attributed to "Paid Social," one to "Organic Search," and one to "Email." The purchase conversion in this report would be credited to the "Organic Search" session, as that is when it occurred.

In short: use the User Acquisition report to analyze top-of-funnel performance and see which channels are best at generating new leads. Use the Traffic Acquisition report for analyzing the sources of day-to-day website traffic and understanding which channels lead to conversions.

Customizing and Sharing Your Report

Now that you've found the report and understand the data, you can customize it to uncover deeper insights.

Add a Secondary Dimension: Click the "+" icon next to the primary dimension dropdown to add a second column for more granular analysis. For example, you could set "Session default channel group" as the primary and "Landing page + query string" as the secondary to see which landing pages perform best for each channel.
Filter Your Data: Use the "Add filter" button at the top of the report to zero in on specific data. You could filter to only show traffic from a specific country, device type, or campaign.
Share or Export: Click the "Share report" icon (a box with an arrow) in the top-right corner to download the data as a PDF or CSV file, or to share a direct link with a team member.

Final Thoughts

Finding the GA4 Traffic Acquisition report is a simple navigation change once you know where to look. It's located under Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition and serves as the primary tool for understanding your session-level marketing performance, replacing the familiar Source/Medium report from Universal Analytics.

Manually pulling reports from GA4, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and a dozen other platforms just to see what's working can be draining. At Graphed, we automate this entire process. We connect directly to all your data sources, allowing you to create real-time dashboards and reports simply by describing what you want to see in plain English. This way, you can get instant insights and spend your time acting on data, not just collecting it.