Level 2

Question

Marketing Channel Detail appearing under multiple Marketing Channels for the same campaign

Forum|Forum|1 day ago
June 11, 2026
2 replies
30 views

Hello,

I’m a relatively new user and am trying to understand Marketing Channel Classification. For example, I have a table where I am pulling in Marketing Channels broken down by Marketing Channel Detail and Page Query String for Marketing Channel Instances.

Looking for help understanding why campaign 710421 with the same Page Query String is being classified under Paid Social and Other Campaign.

Our marketing channel is set to expire in 90 days, Paid Social and Other Campaign are set to Override the Last Touch Channel.

Does the table below point to an issue in our Marketing Channel Processing rules?

Appreciate any advice in understanding the table below.

Marketing Channel Processing rules for Paid Social and Other Campaign:

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Have you recently updated your rules so that there is a period of mis-attribution?

What is the expiry of your eVar4?

While I don’t think the rules are case sensitive… maybe they are? I assume your eVar4 is forcing lower case, but maybe the rules are seeing “Pinterest” and “pinterest” as different values?? And therefore not matching your rule? It’s a shame that the mapped results of Marketing Rules don’t show up in the Post-Processed data in the debugger..

Can I ask a question though? Your “Paid Social” rules only looks for social sources, but no check that they are paid? How are you sure that other links aren’t being placed in those sites (like share links) that are setting the UTM Source to “pinterest” or “linkedin”, etc? Are you sure that your rules aren’t potentially counting shares and non-paid links as “paid”?

M

msweeneyRABAuthor

Level 2

Hi @Jennifer_Dungan, thanks for your help.

The last change made to the Marketing Channel Processing rules was on April 24th when we added a new set of processing rules around Conversational AI, which we call “AI Discovery”.

Here are the eVar4 settings:

To test if this is a recent issue I expanded the date for the table to Feb 1, 2026 - June 30, 2026 and pulled out another example of duplicate marketing channel categorization.

Campaign 706744 is categorized as both Paid Social & Other Campaign Feb-June.

My understanding is that Marketing Channel Instances are the number of times the marketing channel was set during a request. If that is correct, how is the first Page Query String under Other Campaign for campaign 706744 be n_a?

Do I understand correctly that if our processing rules are working properly and we use the Marketing Channel Instances metric we would not see Marketing Channel Details categorized under multiple Marketing Channels?

Good question regarding our Paid Social rule, it’s possible we should look at all of our processing rules to see what improvements can be made.

MandyGeorge

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

We’ve actually had something similar happen at our org recently (although our issue was with the marketing channel detail, not the actual marketing channel itself). So the first thing I’ll note is that your query string evar with a visit expiration could theoretically be persisting from one hit to another. If a hit/page doesn’t have a query string, because your evar expires on the visit, it could persist through to the next page. For us, any page specific evars (QSP, page name, domain, page path, etc.) we set to expire on a hit, that way it doesn’t persist through to the next page. With last touch this would only happen if there isn’t a value on the next page, but still something to try and avoid.

So, for the sake of figuring out what’s going on, first lets check if evar4 actually fired on that ‘other campaign’ hit or if it persisted. Drag in the evar4 instances metric. If it has a value for that row then it actually fired with that QSP, if there is no value, then it persisted.

Do you have access to data feeds? It would be good to look at the pre and post versions of some of the variables to see what actually fired on each it (that was how we solved our issue with the marketing channel detail). If you do, I’d suggest looking at the pre and post versions of evar4 and looking at your marketing channel information to see if you can pinpoint why each channel is being set for each hit.

If you don’t, are you capturing the full URL in workspace in an evar or prop? Hopefully, if you are using an evar it is hit expiry and not visit so it doesn’t have the same issue of persistence as evar4. If there is a campaign value associated with that hit, but no paid social website in the UTM or other QSPs that could be why it’s falling under Other Campaign instead of paid social.

UmangAs4

Level 2

FYI - “All text fields are evaluated as case-insensitive. For example, if you use a rule condition where query string parameter cmp equals ‘abc123’, both the query string parameter and value can use any combination of uppercase and lowercase.” So, no problem with the values.

Also, this is 100% a Marketing Channel Processing Rules behavior issue.
Report shows values appears under both channels because both rules are correct for the same hit -

So why doesn’t Paid Social always win?

Because of rule processing + persistence timing

Even though Adobe usually stops at the first match, this behavior can still happen due to:

Scenario A: First hit vs subsequent hit timing

Hit 1: Campaign code not yet set - Paid Social fires
Hit 2: Campaign code now populated - Other Campaign fires

Scenario B: Channel expiration (90 days) + override

90-day expiration
Override enabled on BOTH rules

So if a user:

First comes via Paid Social - gets classified correctly
Later (same visit or new hit) rule re-evaluates - Other Campaign overrides

Scenario C: Processing order OR evaluation nuance

If Other Campaign is ABOVE or not properly excluded, it can:

Capture traffic before/after Paid Social
Even with identical query strings

Why percentages differ (72% vs 27%)

72% of hits - Paid Social rule fired first
27% of hits - Other Campaign rule took over

That’s not random - it’s rule conflict over time

Root Problem : Your “Other Campaign” rule is too broad and overlaps Paid Social.

Fix rule logic :

Update “Other Campaign” to:

External Campaign Code exists
AND utm_source DOES NOT CONTAIN: facebook, instagram, pinterest, linkedin, youtube

Consider turning OFF override for Other Campaign

Right now it is stealing attribution from Paid Social.

Safer setup:

Paid Social - Override ON
Other Campaign - Override OFF

Reference - Link

MandyGeorge

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

This sounds like an AI generated answer, and it has some of the hallmarks of stuff that AI typically gets wrong.

Adobe ALWAYS stops at the first match. That a basic principle of how marketing channels work. If Adobe doesn’t stop at a rule it’s because it isn’t a match.

This is NOT a problem. As you move down the list of marketing channel rules, you do typically want to get more broad. The higher, specific rules capture the important marketing channels, lower ones can be more broad to capture anything not captured above. The channel rules are fine, they are not a problem, and they don’t need to be fixed. It is not stealing from paid social.

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