Marketing Channels Sum of Visits more than Total Visits

You are both correct and incorrect in your understanding of Marketing Channels.

Yes, it is a waterfall… once a rule matches, that channel is used. However, you are incorrect in your assumption that each VISIT will have a single Marketing Channel.

Let’s look at a simple example:

VISIT:

• (User does a Google Search, and comes to the site)
• Page A
  • Marketing Channel “Search Engine”
  • Marketing Channel Detail “google”
  • Marketing Channel Instance is triggered (this is a metric associated to the Marketing Channel being set)
• Page B
  • Marketing Channel “Search Engine” (due to persisted value)
  • Marketing Channel Detail “google” (due to persisted value)
  • Marketing Channel Instance is NOT triggered (since the Marketing Channel is only persisted, and not set)
• Page C
  • same as Page B
• (User gets a Marketing Email while they are actively browsing the site, and they click on the link)
• Page D
  • Marketing Channel “Email”
  • Marketing Channel Detail “Marketing Email”
  • Marketing Channel Instance is triggered
• Page E
  • Marketing Channel “Email” (due to persisted value)
  • Marketing Channel Detail “Marketing Email” (due to persisted value)
  • Marketing Channel Instance is NOT triggered (since the Marketing Channel is only persisted, and not set)
• Order Made (for this example, this is not counted as a Page View, only as an Action)
  • Marketing Channel “Email” (due to persisted value)
  • Marketing Channel Detail “Marketing Email” (due to persisted value)
  • Marketing Channel Instance is NOT triggered (since the Marketing Channel is only persisted, and not set)
  • Orders triggered

All of the above happens in the same visit, and when you look in your Freeform Table:

There is 1 visit, that has two Marketing Channels, because within the same visit the user came from a Search Engine AND a Marketing Email… the first 3 pages of the visit are associated to the “Search Engine” Channel, and the last 2 pages and the order are associated to the “Email” channel.

You can of course, look at a Participation, or Linear, or another Attribution (using custom attribution in your table) so that you can see your order being associated to both channels, but by default, the last channel is associated by default.

When it comes to the Visits, you still only have 1 visit… but if you were to add the visits that are broken out by channel, you will absolutely overcount your visits… because the total is correctly deduplicating your visits.

This is expected behaviour, many users will have multiple channels in their visit (from getting emails or push notifications mid session, or going to google to do a search instead of using the on-site search, or seeing something in their social media feeds, etc.)