Understanding referrals in Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4, the latest analytics program, can be challenging at first to understand.

It's been slowly integrated into the industry over the last several months. With it is extensive learning and adjusting to the new measurements, tools and data available. Some terminology has changed. Some presentation of data in previous versions have changed. The biggest change to keep in mind is what Google values as valuable information to you as a website analyst or marketer: engagement.

The Google Analytics 4, or GA-4, platform focuses on a person's engagement or event on a website. An event can be a scroll, a click, downloading a PDF, submitting a form, navigating to multiple pages and more. Essentially any action on the site will be considered an event and an engagement.

According to Google, the reason for this emphasis is because it was believed that data like bounce rate gave an inaccurate perception of a website's performance. A site that has a high bounce rate may be considered failing. But, in actuality, it may not be that bad. It could simply be the person found what they were looking for and then went away.

There are many important data points in GA-4 that'll help evaluate the success of your website.

One of those is understanding referral traffic or traffic acquisition.

Traffic acquisition is simply the source of where people came from to get to your site. This was called source/referral in Google Analytics Universal or GA-3.

There are three kinds of traffic acquisition or source/referral:

• Organic = a search engine result (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.)
• Referral = referred by another website or social media
• Direct/none = referral is unknown or user setting prevent tracking

With "direct/none," there are several possibilities that unfortunately we won't be able to know. Those include:

• User types in the URL.
• User clicks on a bookmark in their web browser.
• User clicks on a link in an email.
• User clicks on a link in document, such as a PDF, DocX, ODF, XLSX.
• User clicks on a link in a mobile app.
• User clicks on a link from a secured site (https://) to your non-secured site (http://)
• User clicks through a URL-shortener

You may also come across "not set."

Here's how Google defines it:

"(not set) is a placeholder name that Analytics uses when it hasn't received any information for the dimension you have selected. The reasons for (not set) appearing as a dimension value vary according to the report."