Here's a week I see in a lot of small offices. Someone posts on LinkedIn twice. Someone keeps the Google Business Profile up to date. Someone writes the monthly newsletter. Each of those takes hours, and if you ask which one actually brings people to the website, the honest answer is "no idea."
So every channel gets the same time, and none of them gets better.
The answer is usually already sitting in Google Analytics 4. Nobody opens the right report, or they open it and read the wrong column. This post is the ten-minute version: two reports, one dropdown, and one decision at the end.
All the clicks below come from the free lesson I built on real GA4 screens. The property in the lesson is a real website, so every number on those screens is blurred, and I'm not quoting any figures here either. You'll read your own.
What you need
- Access to a GA4 property. The Viewer role is enough. Reading reports changes no settings.
- No property yet? Google offers a free demo account (the Google Merchandise Store) you can practice on.
First, three words GA4 uses all the time
Get these straight and the reports stop being confusing:
- A user is one person (strictly, one browser).
- A session is one visit.
- An event is anything they do: a page view, a scroll, a click, a form sent.
And one more that matters for the decision later: an engaged session is a visit that lasted more than 10 seconds, viewed two or more pages, or included a key event. Engagement rate is engaged sessions divided by all sessions.
Step 1: read the snapshot (the "how many")
- Open analytics.google.com and pick your property. Home shows a quick summary.
- Click the Reports icon (the bar chart) in the left bar.
- Reports snapshot opens with four cards: Active users, New users, Average engagement time and Event count.
- Set the date range at the top right. It's the last 28 days by default; Last 90 days smooths out a quiet week.
This tells you how many people came. It doesn't tell you where from, which is the question you actually have.
Step 2: Traffic acquisition (the "from where")
- In the left menu, under Life cycle, click Acquisition.
- Click Traffic acquisition. It groups every session by where it came from.
- Google may show AI insights at the top, then a chart of sessions over time per channel. Scroll past both to the table.
The table has one row per channel, using the dimension Session primary channel group:
- Organic Search (Google and other search engines)
- Direct (typed in or bookmarked)
- Organic Social
- Referral (links from other sites)
- Paid
- Unassigned (GA couldn't tell)
Each row shows Sessions, Engaged sessions and Engagement rate. Click a column header to sort.
Step 3: sort twice, not once
This is the part people skip.
Sort by Sessions first and note the top two channels. Then sort by Engagement rate and note the top two again.
If they're the same channels, easy: that's where your visitors come from and they're interested. If they're different, look harder. A channel with fewer sessions but a much higher engagement rate is bringing people who actually read. Those visitors may be worth more than a bigger channel full of ten-second bounces.
That's the whole point of this exercise. "Most visits" is not the same as "best visits," and the hour you spend on a channel should follow the second one.
Step 4: drop down to the exact source
A channel name is still a bucket. "Referral" could be one industry directory or forty random sites.
- Click the Session primary channel group dropdown above the table.
- Pick Session source / medium.
Now each row is a site plus a medium, such as google / organic, linkedin.com / referral or newsletter / email. The top rows are where your visitors really come from.
Changing the date range or the table dimension only changes your view. It doesn't touch any setting for anyone else; settings live under Admin.
Why your newsletter might look like it does nothing
If your newsletter or social links aren't tagged, those visits often land in Direct or Unassigned instead of Email or Organic Social. The channel looks dead when it isn't.
The fix is UTM tags on the links you control (newsletter buttons, links in your social posts). Once they're tagged, GA4 can put those visits in the right row, and the comparison in Step 3 becomes fair.
Mistakes I see most
- Judging by Sessions alone. A big number of short visits can hide a small channel that brings your best people.
- Reading a 7-day window. One slow week or one viral post skews everything. Use 28 or 90 days for a decision like this.
- Writing off a channel that was never tagged. Check Direct and Unassigned before you decide the newsletter doesn't work.
- Stopping at the channel. Open Session source / medium before you change anything. The exact site usually tells you what to do more of.
The checklist
- [ ] Reports > Reports snapshot, last 28 or 90 days, read the four cards
- [ ] Acquisition > Traffic acquisition, scroll to the table
- [ ] Sort by Sessions, note the top two
- [ ] Sort by Engagement rate, note the top two
- [ ] Switch the dimension to Session source / medium
- [ ] Write down where your hours go today
- [ ] Move one hour a week to the channel with the most engaged sessions, and check again in a month
That last line is the business part. The report is free and takes ten minutes. The value is in actually moving the hour.
Practice it step by step
The lesson, Google Analytics 4: See Which Channel Brings Your Visitors, walks through every click above on real GA4 screens, with the numbers blurred and no account touched. It's module 1 of my free course Google Analytics 4 Basics: Where Visitors Come From. Module 2, Find Your Top Pages and Form Submissions, picks up where this one stops: once you know where visitors come from, which pages they read and whether they fill in the form. There's also a one-page GA4 cheat sheet if you want the clicks on one screen.
Practice it step by step, free: https://learn.ynteractive.com/content/ga4-traffic-sources
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