Getting None in my Direct Marketing Channel Detail

“None” is a catchall bucket that can be set when none of your rules match.

Without seeing ALL your rules and how specific they are, we won’t be able to identify what traffic is falling through the cracks.

This can be caused by you having very specific rules, and new types of campaign data (either intentional from your teams, or something coming from an external source), that you aren’t capturing. Or it could be triggered by some change in Adobe… 

On that note, why are you specifically looking only for “Referrer” traffic on the “first hit of the visit”?? This will lose a lot of potential referrer traffic mid-visit..

In general, “first hit of the visit” is only used for Direct or Internal, nothing else, because the potential to lose traceability is too great.

Example:

Visit 1:

• (Direct Entry)
• Page A
  • Marketing Channel set to “Direct”
• Page B
  • Marketing Channel retains value “Direct”
• Page C
  • Marketing Channel retains value “Direct”
• (User opens a new tab, and clicks on a link to your site from “SiteB.com”)
• Page D
  • In most setups, the Marketing Channel will now be set to “Referrer”
  • In your setup, this is ignored
• Page E
  • In most setups, the Marketing Channel retains value “Referrer”
  • In your setup, Marketing Channel retains value “Direct”
• Conversion - Order
  • In most setups, the Marketing Channel retains value “Referrer” (so “Referrer” will be associated to this conversion, and by Participation Attribution, you will see both Direct and Referrer)
  • In your setup, Marketing Channel retains value “Direct” (your conversion will only see “Direct” - all information about the Referrer channel is lost)

Visit 2:

• (User does a Google Search)
• Page F
  • Marketing Channel set to “Search Engine”

In your rules, you won’t have any channel information about your Referrer… 

At first glance it looks like a timing issue to me, capturing the visit before the page name. I read through you conversation with Jen and know you have already been looking into this. Did you have a change record for when the problem spiked? 

Can you breakdown the none bucket with the page name or URL dimension so see if it is happening only in one place? that could beam a mis-tagged landing page or something. 

Hi ​@denise_arjunan1 

From your screenshots, Direct is defined as:

• Referrer does not exist (and not internal)
• Is first hit of visit
• Channel value = Page (so Marketing Channel Detail = Page)

When Marketing Channel Detail = Page, None simply means "the page / pageName was blank on that hit."

So the spike in Direct / None = a spike in Direct visits whose first hit has no page value – typically:

• Only s.tl (link) calls firing with no s.pageName
• Server‑side / API hits without a page name
• SPA / app hits where the first view event stopped populating pageName / web.webPageDetails.name

Your Marketing Channel rule did not break; the implementation feeding the Page dimension did.

1. Confirm the cause
   In Workspace, build a Freeform table:
   • Rows: Marketing Channel Detail, then Page, then Hit Type
   • Filter: Marketing Channel = Direct AND Marketing Channel Detail = None
     You'll see those hits have blank Page and often Hit Type = Link/server call.
2. Fix your implementation
   • Make sure the first hit of every visit always has a page value:
     • AppMeasurement: set s.pageName on every page view (especially the entry hit)
     • Web SDK: set xdm.web.webPageDetails.name (or at least xdm.web.webPageDetails.URL)
     • Mobile SDK: use trackState with a non-empty state name

Once page (or landing page) is consistently populated on the first hit, Direct / None will drop back to normal and you'll again see the actual pages in Marketing Channel Detail.