Acquisition Source / Medium reports provide basic information on the traffic source and traffic medium of your website users. At a glance the Source / Medium reports look very similar to Channel Reports. However, source medium is a bit more granular and can be customized based on how advertising campaigns are tagged.

Overview

Acquisition Source / Medium reports provide basic information on the traffic source and traffic medium of your website users. At a glance the Source / Medium reports look very similar to Channel Reports. However, source medium is a bit more granular and can be customized based on how advertising campaigns are tagged.

Sample Source / Medium Report

Here’s a sample Source/Medium report. Note that this report is more granular than the Channels report in how it breaks traffic down into detailed traffic buckets.

source-medium

Real World Uses

  • View basic metrics on specific sources and mediums which drive traffic, conversions, etc.
  • For high-converting sources / mediums, consider ways to scale.
  • For low-converting sources / medium, consider ways to improve the user experience.

Critical Thinking

  • Majority of sources / mediums are auto tagged in Google Analytics. This means that there is built-in logic to determine what the source and medium are. For example, Organic Search traffic is auto tagged for all search engine traffic which isn’t specifically tagged as being “paid”.
  • Some sources / mediums are NOT auto-tagged. For example, there is no real way for Google Analytics to know that traffic comes from an email marketing campaign unless you use UTM codes to tell it.
  • If you market through specific sources / mediums and they do not appear on this report (or the numbers look “off”), double check that UTM tracking is in place. We’ll cover UTM tracking in detail later in this course.

FAQs

  • Q: Some sources / mediums in my report look spammy, why? A: At this time, all Google Analytics users are seeing spammy data which can be ignored. In our advanced Google Analytics course, we discuss ways to filter this traffic out.