Guide 55 · Reports · GA4 + Tag Manager
Read the User acquisition report: which channels first brought your new users in
User acquisition groups each person by the channel of their first visit. Use it to judge what brings new people in — not what brings sessions back.
After step 5, you can name the channel that brought the most first-time users, and say how many of them came back in a later session.
Download the report reference: the User acquisition reference (JSON) (1558 bytes, MD5 88d3a29e60ec8e47e66fcfa7e276b846). It holds the report or exploration definition and the worked example with the recomputed figures shown on this page.
What you need
- Viewer access or above on the property.
- The report path: Reports, then Acquisition, then User acquisition.
- A fixed date range. First-user attribution depends on the range: a user whose first visit falls outside it does not appear as a new user in it.
The trace
- Open the report. Sign in, click Reports, then Acquisition, then User acquisition. The default primary dimension is First user default channel group, and every row is grouped by the channel of that user's first visit.
- Read new users, not sessions, as the headline. The report's question is how new users found the site for the first time. Sessions in this report are the sessions of those new users, not all sessions. A channel with many sessions here is one that acquired many people, not one that brings people back.
- Check the first-user dimension on any row you quote. Dimensions in this report carry the First user prefix. If you switch the primary dimension to a plain source or medium, you are no longer reading first-user scope, and the numbers change meaning. Keep the First user prefix on any dimension you quote from this report.
- Use it to judge a channel before you cut it. A channel that looks weak in Traffic acquisition can still be the one that first brought many of your new users. Before cutting spend on a channel, read its new-user count here; cutting the channel that introduces people starves the channels that close them.
- Compare with Traffic acquisition to split first visits from return visits. Read the same channel in Traffic acquisition. The gap between the two is the return traffic that channel brings. Neither report is wrong when they disagree; they answer different questions.
Dead ends
DEAD END — READING THIS REPORT AS A SESSION REPORT. Sessions here belong to newly acquired users only. Comparing its session count with Traffic acquisition's session count and calling the difference a loss is a scope error.
DEAD END — DROPPING THE FIRST USER PREFIX. Plain source and medium dimensions are event-scoped. Switching to them inside this report silently changes what every number means.
DEAD END — CUTTING A CHANNEL ON TRAFFIC ACQUISITION ALONE. A channel that introduces new users and rarely closes a sale looks weak in the session report. The user report is the check that stops a bad cut.
End state
User acquisition answers one question: how did each person first arrive. The worked example below recomputes the rates for three first-user channels, so the ranking by new users can be read beside the ranking by revenue.
Worked example — stated inputs, recomputed results. The channels below are stated inputs for the example. Every rate in the table was recomputed from them.
| Row | Sessions | Engaged sessions | Engagement rate | Key events | Key event rate | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Search | 1,280 | 902 | 70.5% | 88 | 6.9% | $1,140.75 |
| Organic Social | 640 | 310 | 48.4% | 34 | 5.3% | $402.25 |
| Referral | 215 | 148 | 68.8% | 19 | 8.8% | $275.50 |
| Total | 2,135 | 1,360 | 63.7% | 141 | 6.6% | $1,818.50 |
Revenue per session is $1,818.50 ÷ 2,135 sessions = $0.85. Engagement rate is 1,360 ÷ 2,135 = 63.7%.
Sources
- Analytics Help — [GA4] Traffic acquisition report — User acquisition shows where new users come from, as distinct from Traffic acquisition which shows where new and returning users come from
- Analytics Help — Confirm that you are collecting data — many reports and explorations can take 24 to 48 hours to process data
Checked 11 November 2026. The click paths above are the ones in Google's help pages, opened or read 11 November 2026 (the Explorations and detail-report pages were opened in full; the report, library, navigation and thresholds pages were read from Google's help results the same day, after the browser hit a rate limit). No step in this guide was run inside a live Analytics property, because that needs a Google sign-in and this site does not sign in as anyone. The worked-example figures on this page were recomputed in Python with decimal arithmetic, and the downloadable JSON file carries the same recomputed figures. Google moves menu items without warning; if a path on this page no longer matches, the linked help page is the current map.