Acquisition: Where Users Come From
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to: explain what acquisition is and why it matters, name the main channels users come through, measure a channel by the quality of its users and not just the number, and explain why a channel's numbers can overstate what it really brings in.
What acquisition is, and why it matters
Acquisition is everything that brings a person to use your product for the first time. It covers the whole path from "never heard of it" to "just signed up", or "just placed a first order".
It matters in analytics for three reasons.
It's usually where the most money goes. Ads, promotions, partnerships and sales teams cost real money every month, and a data scientist is often asked whether that money is well spent.
It's the easiest part of growth to buy. You can almost always get more new users by spending more. That makes acquisition numbers easy to inflate, so they need careful checking.
The quality of new users decides everything after it. A user who arrives through a good channel is more likely to activate, stay and pay. So acquisition isn't just about how many people arrive. It's about who.
The channels users come through
A channel is the route a new user takes to find you. Here are the main ones.
| Channel | How users arrive | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Direct and organic | They already know you. They type your name, or open the app store and search for it | Someone who heard about the app from a friend and searched for it |
| Search | They search for a need, and find you in the results | Searching "cheap flights to Tokyo" and clicking a travel site |
| Paid ads | You pay a platform to show you to people | Ads on search, social media or other apps |
| Referral | An existing user invites them | "Give a friend $10, get $10" |
| Partnerships and defaults | Another company puts you in front of its users | Being the default search engine in a browser |
| Brand marketing | Broad ads that build awareness, not clicks | TV, billboards, sponsorships |
The last two are easy to forget, but they can be huge.
Google pays companies like Apple to be the default search engine in their browsers. In the antitrust case against Google, the court found that Google's payment to Apple for this in 2022 was an estimated $20 billion, and that in 2021 Google paid more than $26 billion in what it calls "traffic acquisition costs" to all its distribution partners. That's acquisition at enormous scale. The court calls this the "power of defaults": changing a default takes effort, and that friction keeps people on whatever comes already set up.