Skip to main content
User acquisition answers a different question from the channel cards on your main dashboard: which source first brought each user to you, and how did those users behave during the selected period? It attributes every active user to the acquisition context of their first-ever session. Open a site, then choose User acquisition under Acquisition & quality.

​
How does first-touch attribution work?

tinyanalytics finds each user’s first-ever session and keeps that session’s channel, source, medium, campaign, source/medium pair, and referrer as the user’s first-touch acquisition values. A later visit from another source does not rewrite that history. The page combines two time scopes:
Filters narrow the activity inside your selected window. They do not change a user’s historical first-touch source. For example, filtering to country = DE answers “how did users active in Germany during this period first find us?”

​
Explore your acquisition mix

1

Choose the audience and date range

Use All users, Identified, or Anonymous beside the date controls. Identified means the user had an identified event inside the selected window; Anonymous is its complement.
2

Choose a first-touch dimension

Switch between Channel, Source, Medium, Campaign, Source / Medium, and Referrer. The chart shows new users over time for the five leading values, with the rest grouped as Other.
3

Compare user quality

Read the table across Users, New users, % New, Returning, Sessions, Bounce, Avg duration, and Events/session. Sort or search the table to find the acquisition sources that bring people back and produce deeper sessions.
Click a value above the chart to isolate it and filter the table. Clear the selection to return to the full mix. When period comparison is active, the Users column also shows the change from the comparison window.

​
What do the columns mean?

​
How should I interpret identified and anonymous users?

The audience switch describes identity inside the selected window:
  • Identified includes users with at least one event linked to an ID you supplied with identify() during the window.
  • Anonymous includes users with no identified event during the window.
  • All users combines both groups.
Identification can merge recent anonymous activity into the stable user ID, so an identified user’s first-touch source can predate the moment you identified them.
Anonymous first-touch attribution is an estimate. A change in IP address or user agent can create a new cookieless ID, which can undercount returning users. Use identify() for signed-in users when you need stable cross-device acquisition history.

​
Verify the report

Pick a date range that includes a known campaign. The row for that campaign should show its first-time users under New users. Move the range forward: those same active people move to Returning, but their first-touch campaign stays unchanged.

Traffic classification

See how referrers and campaign parameters become channels.

Identify users

Keep signed-in acquisition history stable across devices.

AI traffic

Measure sessions arriving from AI assistants.

Metric definitions

Use the same definitions across every report.

Related topics

User AnalyticsUser Retention AnalyticsUser Journey Analytics