Paid Search

Paid search is GA4's channel for visits that arrive from a clicked search ad — typically Google Ads, where the medium is cpc or ppc. It keeps the traffic you paid for separate from unpaid organic search, so you can judge whether your ad spend is actually buying you visits that do something.

Why it matters

Paid search is the one channel where every click has a price. That makes it the channel where measurement matters most — a small misread can mean pouring money into keywords that bring clicks but no clients. Reading paid search properly is the difference between an ad budget that compounds and one that quietly leaks.

A concrete example

You link Google Ads to GA4 so spend auto-tags into the Paid Search channel. Over a month you see 540 paid sessions, an engagement rate of 44%, and 11 key events. Your organic traffic, by contrast, converts at nearly double the rate. That doesn't mean ads are failing — it means paid visitors are colder, and the comparison tells you how hard each dollar is working.

The common misreading

The mistake is judging paid search on last-click conversions alone and cutting campaigns that look unprofitable. But paid often does its work early in the journey — introducing people who later return via organic or direct and convert then. Before you cut, check the attribution model: under last-click, paid's assist role is invisible, and you may be killing the channel that started the relationship.