A marketing manager observes that the number of conversions attributed to Paid Search in their Advertising workspace reports is higher than the number attributed to Paid Search in the standard Traffic Acquisition Report. What's the reason for this discrepancy?

The difference arises because the reports use different attribution models based on their scope. The Traffic Acquisition report is session-scoped: it credits a conversion to the source of the session in which it happened. The Advertising workspace reports use the property's attribution model, which distributes credit across the touchpoints in the conversion path — so a paid search click that contributed to a conversion completed later in a different session still receives credit there, and none in the session-scoped view. Neither report is wrong; they answer different questions. Session-scoped reporting tells you which channel was present when the conversion occurred, while attribution reporting tells you which channels contributed to it. Comparing them side by side without knowing that is one of the most common sources of 'the numbers don't match' arguments in analytics.