How Do I Know Where My Customers Come From? (Complete Guide)
You can see where your customers come from in one report: Google Analytics 4 → Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. It groups every visit into channels — organic search, direct, paid, social, email, referral — so you can see which ones bring people who actually buy.
Read next: how to read Google Analytics · attribution explained · try Metriko free
Three steps, ten minutes
- Open Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
- Set the date range to the last 28 days and turn on the comparison with the previous period.
- Sort by conversions or revenue, not by sessions.
That last step is the whole trick. Sorting by sessions tells you where visitors come from. Sorting by revenue tells you where customers come from. They are rarely the same list.
What the channels mean
- Organic search — people who found you on Google. Slow to build, cheap to keep.
- Direct — typed your address or clicked an untracked link. Often a catch-all for missing tags.
- Paid search / Paid social — ads. Compare cost against the revenue in this row.
- Organic social — posts and profile links.
- Referral — other websites linking to you.
- Email — only if your newsletter links are tagged.
Fix the two things that break this report
Tag every link you control with UTM parameters (newsletters, bio links, partner posts). Untagged links fall into "direct" and disappear. And make sure a conversion is actually defined in your property — otherwise the report can never show you who buys.
The easier way: let Metriko read it for you
Even a clean acquisition report still asks you to interpret it: is a 12% drop in organic normal? Is that paid channel profitable? This is where most people give up — not because the data is missing, but because reading it feels like reading a spreadsheet in a foreign language.
Metriko connects to your Google Analytics in about a minute and turns that same report into plain text you read like an email: which channels grew, which shrank, which ones brought real revenue, and what to look at next. No dashboards to build, no metrics to learn, nothing to migrate — GA4 stays exactly where it is.
If you only have ten minutes a week for analytics, spend them reading a summary instead of assembling one.
Keep reading: website traffic attribution explained, how to read Google Analytics, what does my website data mean.