You will be able to go straight to the GA4 report that answers where visitors came from, what they did and whether they acted.
Farah's business partner asked her a simple question on a Monday morning: did the Instagram push last week bring anyone to the shop? Farah opened GA4, clicked through four reports, found three different numbers for Instagram, and twenty minutes later answered "probably". Her partner was not impressed, and neither was Farah.
GA4 has a lot of reports, but most everyday marketing questions are answered by a handful of them. This lesson maps five common questions to the report that answers each, and shows the two adjustments that turn a general report into a specific answer.
One note before you start: Google rearranges GA4's menus from time to time, and newer properties group reports into collections with names like "generate leads" or "drive online sales". The report names below are the ones to search for if your menu looks different.
The traffic acquisition report answers this. Each row is a channel group, such as Organic Search, Email or Paid Social, and the columns show sessions, engaged sessions, key events and more. The report counts sessions, so a person who visited three times appears three times, each under whatever source brought them that time.
Change the main dimension from the default channel group to session source and medium, and you see the detail behind each channel: instagram and social, newsletter and email, google and cpc. This is where your UTM tags from module 2 show up. Switch to session campaign to see each campaign by name.
For the partner's question, Farah needed exactly this: traffic acquisition, last week, filtered to the instagram source. She would have had her answer in a minute if she had started here.
The user acquisition report looks similar but answers a different question. It groups users by the source of their very first visit, and keeps that first source no matter how they come back later.
So the two reports disagree, and both are right. Suppose a customer first found Farah's shop through an Instagram post, then came back twice from her newsletter. Traffic acquisition shows one Instagram session and two email sessions. User acquisition shows one user from Instagram. Use user acquisition when the question is which channels bring in new people, and traffic acquisition when the question is which channels bring visits in a given period.
The engagement reports cover what happened after the visitor arrived. The events report, from lesson 3.1, lists every event and how often it happened. The pages and screens report shows which pages people viewed and for how long. The landing page report shows the first page of each session, with the key events that followed.
Landing pages are often the most useful of the three for marketing, because the landing page is where your ad, email or post sent people. If Farah's trousers campaign sent people to a product page that has plenty of sessions and almost no purchases, the problem is probably on that page, not in the campaign.
For results, look at key events and, if you sell online, the monetisation reports. Most acquisition and engagement reports include key events as a column, and you can choose which key event to show from a dropdown at the top of the column. That lets you see enquiries or purchases by channel, by campaign or by landing page in the same table.
If your site sends purchase events with values, the monetisation reports show revenue, purchases and items sold. For Farah, the e-commerce purchases report shows which products sold, and the traffic acquisition report with the purchase key event selected shows which channels brought the buyers.
Most questions do not need a new report. They need one of two adjustments to a report you already have open.
The first is a comparison. Every standard report lets you add a comparison, which splits the whole report by a condition, such as mobile against desktop, Singapore against other countries, or new against returning users. You can also compare date ranges, such as last month against the month before. A number with nothing to compare it to tells you very little, and this is the quickest way to give it context.
The second is a secondary dimension. In the table, the small plus sign beside the main dimension adds a second breakdown. Traffic acquisition by channel with landing page as the secondary dimension shows which pages each channel sends people to. Landing page with session source as the secondary dimension shows where the visitors to each page came from.
Farah's twenty-minute search became a routine. Monday mornings, she opens traffic acquisition, sets the date range to last week with a comparison to the week before, switches the dimension to session source and medium, and picks purchase in the key events column. Three clicks, one answer.
You will build the same habit with your own data, starting with three questions most owners ask every month.
Answer three questions from your own GA4 data: which channel brought the most sessions last month, which landing page had the most key events, and which campaign brought new users.
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