Google CPC first-time visits are being classified as Referral | Community
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BryceR22
Level 1
June 8, 2026
Question

Google CPC first-time visits are being classified as Referral

  • June 8, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 12 views

I'm troubleshooting a Marketing Channels issue in Adobe Analytics.

My Paid Search rule is:

IF ANY

  • Query String Parameter utm_medium contains cpc

  • Query String Parameter utm_source contains google or bing

THEN Paid Search

My Referral rule is:

IF ALL

  • Referring Domain is not empty

  • Tracking Code does not contain cpc or paid social

THEN Referral

I'm finding hundreds of First Time Visits classified as Referral where:

  • Referrer = google.com

  • Campaign UTM Medium = cpc

  • Campaign UTM Source = google

All of our paid search traffic comes from Google/Bing and uses valid UTM parameters (utm_source=google, utm_medium=cpc).

When I break down these Referral visits, most are associated with Google CPC campaigns and paid search landing pages.

Given the Paid Search rule above, I would expect these visits to be classified as Paid Search, not Referral.

Has anyone seen Google CPC first-time visits fall into Referral despite matching Paid Search criteria?

2 replies

MandyGeorge
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
MandyGeorgeCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
June 8, 2026

First thing to check is the order of your rules. Which rule comes first in your marketing channel rules? Hits are checked against the first rule (rule #1), if they match, they’re assigned, if not, it moves onto rule #2, and so on. 

So this means that if your referral rule is listed before your paid search rule, then the hits will get assigned to referral and not even be checked against the paid search rule. Can you confirm which order your rules are in?

 

The next thing I would check is make sure your query string parameters aren’t malformed. It’s unlikely to be the cause, but it’s a good idea just to check and make sure that they’re formatted correctly to be recognized as valid QSPs. 

Jennifer_Dungan
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
June 9, 2026

I agree with ​@MandyGeorge check the order… but the next thing, is what metric are you looking at? Are you sure you aren’t just seeing the result of cross-channel attribution?

 

A common mistake that people make when troubleshooting Marketing Channels is forgetting that there can be multiple channels within the same visit.

 

First, please look at the metric “Marketing Channel Instances” against your Channel breakdowns and see if you still have as many Google CPC hits as you believe.

 

Also, when was the last time you updated your rules and what retention period are you using (default is 30 days). It’s possible if you made recent changes, you might be seeing traffic that was mis-associated before your recent change and you either need to wait 30 days for that data to clear, or you need to force a reset of your channels so that you start with clean data from “point X”

 

 

Could you share some screenshots of your rules? There may be something strange there that wasn’t included in your description of your rules, but it might be impacting what’s happening? I would expect Adobe should trim whitespace on the rules, but to be safe, make sure there are no extra spaces in your Paid Search rules (just in case). I believe that Marketing Channel Rules should not be case sensitive, but that could be something to check as well?

 

Do you have a QA or Dev suite? Can you set up the rules there and test in isolation?

 

Good Luck, and hoping to hear more details.

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