Working with Acquisition Channel

Acquisition reports are the place we go to see where users are really coming from and whether there may be any missed opportunities in bringing more engaged traffic to the site. They can help to analyze how each traffic source performs and then help adjust marketing strategies. 

In the channel's report, we can see detailed metrics in the key channels that drive user traffic to the site. What is your best performance force for traffic, what is your worst? Which channel or medium sends you the most traffic? Which channel gets you the best bang for your buck? How is your offline marketing comparing to your online sources? All of these are relatively easy once you get the hang of making these acquisition reports really work for you. 

• Organic search: This is the traffic that comes to your site by clicking on a standard search engine results page, such as Google, Baidu.
• Paid search: Paid ads shown at the top.
• Direct: Just directly visited the site, by typing in the URL.
• Referrals: Referring traffic from a link, so if you went to a webpage, follow a link then you are referred by that link to the site, it will be captured in this channel as a referral, and it knows which site is referring you over.  
• Social: These are social visits coming from social media sites in the posts. 
• Affiliates come from affiliate marketing efforts, so in this case, the Google partners are the affiliates of Google in their merchandise store. 
• Display is advertising but not necessarily search engine based, these are graphical ads that show up on sites around articles and other pieces of content. 

Now within this channels report, we can analyze these channels by the standard metrics we've discussed here, got your acquisition, your behavior, and your conversions.

You can also focus on the quantity metrics like users and sessions to see which channel brought the most visits, in this case clearly Organic Search contributed the most amount of traffic, Direct is at the 2nd place.

You can also look at the quality based metrics that really show the value of these channels and the users that come from them. So, let’s look at referrals, and not only does this channel have the lowest bounce rate, 22.37%, but it also brings in the most revenue $699,571, far above the others. Although they don't necessarily bring in the most traffic, while it's converting really well. This is clearly a very important channel.

We can just click inside the referral channel to drill into each data, it looks like about a hundred different sources here that are referring the user to the google merchandise store, we can continue our analysis on which of these individual referral sources provided the best sessions to the site, the most revenue or any of these other metrics we want to take a look at. For example, site.google.com is the best referral which has a low bounce rate, high E-commerce Conversation rate, even though brings in 8895 users (9.92%), brings in $233,140 (33.33%)revenue.

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