GA4 Source/medium breakdown

[Lewis_Vertical]

On GA4 under the traffic acquisition report you can change the dimension to source/medium, however in Looker this is not available?

I am trying to replicate the attached which is currently running off a UA account.

[Roderick]

The source/medium dimension is not available in Looker for GA4 yet. This is because GA4 uses a different data model than Universal Analytics, and the source/medium dimension is not part of the GA4 data model.

However, there are a few workarounds that you can use to get the same information as the source/medium dimension in Looker.

1. Use the session source and session medium dimensions. These dimensions are similar to the source/medium dimension, but they are not exactly the same. The session source dimension shows the source of the traffic, such as a search engine, a social media platform, or a direct link. The session medium dimension shows the medium of the traffic, such as a link, a click, or a social media share.

2. Use the user acquisition report in Looker. This report shows the channels that users are using to find your website. The channels are grouped into different categories, such as organic search, paid search, social media, and direct traffic.

3. Use the custom dimensions and metrics feature in Looker to create your own dimension that is similar to the source/medium dimension. To do this, you will need to create a custom dimension that maps to the source/medium dimension in GA4.

I hope this helps! Let me know how you get on. 

[Lewis_Vertical]

Hi Roderick,

Thank you for your reply,

Do you know when source/medium will be available in Looker - seems very odd that a dimension would be available in GA4, but not available in Google's own tool that is meant to allow you to use data from GA4 for reports/dashboards?

Unfortunately channels/source/medium on their own are not useful for my use.