When you’re looking for ways to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, you need to be tracking your website’s source/medium data.
This stat is essential for getting an accurate measurement of marketing attribution—but with the changes to Google Analytics 4, it can be a tricky one to nail down reporting for.
But don’t worry—we’ve got you covered with a video walkthrough on exactly how to build this report as part of our GA4 courses series.
We’ll show you how to create source/medium reports in Google Analytics and provide some tips on how to use this data to improve your marketing efforts.
How to build source/medium reports in GA4
As we’ve mentioned in past editions of our GA4 courses series—and you’ve no doubt seen if you have a GA4 property already set up—Google Analytics 4 takes a totally different approach to display your store’s metrics than the old Universal Analytics.
While things like customer behavior reports and sales performance reports rely on the new explorations feature to let users build custom reports, source medium reports don’t need as much work.
The out-of-the-box traffic acquisition report works as your base, and from there you’ll add “source / medium” as a custom dimension to the report and remove the default dimensions. After that, all you need to do is save the report and you can view it in your GA4 library of reports.
Check out the full video below to see step-by-step how to build the source/medium report yourself:
Tip: Prefer to have an expert set your store up on GA4? Book a demo with one of our team members and they’ll show you how to get GA4 reports up and running for your store in minutes.
How to use “source/medium” reports in GA4
When you’re determining marketing attribution and calculating your ROI on marketing campaigns, the source/medium report comes in handy as a guide to your most effective traffic sources.
Being able to pinpoint which sources send the most visits to your store allows you to focus more narrowly on winning campaigns, and by using UTM parameters in your marketing efforts you can determine the mediums that drive the highest traffic as well.
Put it all together and you have a nice picture of which channels to focus on, which strategies in your promotion mix work best, and where you can cut costs and maximize ROI and return on ad spend.
Dive deeper into GA4
Getting old Google Analytics reports to work in GA4 is one key piece of making the move to the new Analytics, but it’s not the only thing you need to check off your list.
We have plenty of resources to help you make sure you’ve covered everything you need to not only start using GA4, but make sure you keep historical data for your store and get the same reports you’ve always relied on.
- Jump into GA4 with Google Analytics Expert Krista Seiden
- How to start on the right foot with GA4 [Podcast]
- How to tell if you’re ready to make the switch to GA4
- Why you should switch to server-side tracking for ecommerce analytics
- How to build customer behavior reports in Google Analytics 4
- How to create sales performance reports in Google Analytics 4
