The User acquisition and Traffic acquisition reports are pre-made behavioral reports in Google Analytics 4 that enable you to connect behavior and engagement to where users come from. For example, you can compare engagement from users who landed on your site from a newsletter to those from an ad campaign.
The two behavioral reports differ in scope. The User acquisition report is scoped to new users, while the Traffic acquisition report is scoped to new sessions. For example, new users might find your website organically, but you're able to re-engagement the users through specific remarketing campaigns.
The following table summarizes key differences between the two reports:
| Category | User acquisition | Traffic acquisition |
| Scope | User | Session |
| Focus | New users | New sessions |
| Objective |
Understand how new users find and land on your website or app |
Understand how you're able to re-engage users across sessions |
| Dimensions |
Includes user-scoped, cross-channel traffic source dimensions such as First user source, First user medium, and First user campaign |
Includes session-scoped, cross-channel traffic source dimensions such as Session source, Session medium, and Session campaign |
Compare metrics across reports
The User acquisition and Traffic acquisition reports include many of the same engagement metrics by default. For example, the reports both include Engaged sessions, Engagement rate, Engaged sessions per active user, and Total revenue.
However, the dimensions in the leftmost column differ in scope so you can expect to see different values for the same metrics across reports. Therefore, you should not compare the metric values across the reports because you will see different values for the different scopes.
Example 1
If a user lands on a website for the first time from Google and later reopens the same website 10 more times directly by entering the site URL, then the 2 reports will be as follows:
- The User acquisition report will have all 11 sessions counted in the “Google” row
- The Traffic acquisition report will have 1 session in the “Google” row and the other 10 sessions in the “(direct)” row
The difference allows you to analyze your efforts to acquire new users in the User acquisition report, as well as your efforts to engage those users on each of their visits (sessions) to your site in the Traffic acquisition report.
Example 2
If you notice 'google' in the left column, you will likely notice different values for the Engagement rate metric:
- The User acquisition report displays the engagement rate for users who landed on the website from Google first over all their sessions on the website.
- The Traffic acquisition report displays the engagement rate only for the sessions that began on the website from Google regardless of what happened for sessions of the same user who began from different channels.
The following images provide a real side-by-side comparison of the two reports:
In this comparison, notice that while the value is 'google' in both reports, the dimension in the top left differs. The User acquisition report shows the First user source dimension (which is a user-scoped dimension and includes 'First user'), while the Traffic acquisition report shows the Session source dimension (which is a session-scoped dimension and includes 'Session').