Why Is One Domain Dominating the Internal Referrer Marketing Channel in CJA?

Do you have any specific flows that drive traffic from one internal domain to another? Or a flow that might cause the user to stay on a page long enough to trigger a separate session?

I don’t know about CJA, or how your derived field is made, but typically you would only track an Internal Referrer in your Marketing Channels for new sessions. You don’t want to track every page to page link, or that would kill the attribution of your other channels.

Internal Referrers shouldn’t typically be a high traffic channel, since it should really only happen in a few scenarios, like:

• when the user is on the site, leaves for a while, then comes back (creating a new session) and resumes their journey (in this case, the first page of the visit would be from an internal page)
• If the tracking is incorrectly configured, then flows that send users from Domain A to Domain B could treat Domain A like a Marketing Channel… this isn’t good, because you would lose the correct Marketing Channel that drove the visit (and while yes, you can change your attribution model to look at something like Participation for cross-channel attribution) its harder for non-analysts, and it still does destroy the “Last Touch” if that is the interested model.

Having a single domain dominating the results may just be the result of a flow that more often causes the user to trigger a new session (like, maybe you have an embedded crossword puzzle that keeps people on the site by not sending tracking), or maybe there is a tracking issue that is causing site to site flows to re-track a new Marketing Channel mid-session…. or maybe there is a problem with your derived field… 

Are you using this in a report with Landing Page or Session Start? As in are you only looking at the Channel for the first page of the visit, not for all pages on site?
I’ve also noticed that the template for building Marketing Channels in CJA from Adobe isn’t always ideal, there are some instances where it doesn’t quite work. Are you using the template or have you built your own custom rule for Channels?

The problem is that derived fields evaluate with every request. In other words, on the second page view of your visit, the referrer is your internal domain and hence the marketing channel overwrite previously set search and social channels.

The key here is how you set up the internal referrers rule. 

1. set up the internal referrer rule to return “no value” instead of a “internal referrers” channel name. The internal referrers and/or session refresh marketing channels you may know no longer exist in CJA

2. Outside the derived field function, in your data view’s component section, choose the middle “no value” setting “show no value by default”. This will prevent the previously set value from being overwritten 
3. allocation: "most recent"
4. expiration: whatever is suitable for you e.g., 30 days

What you are seeing is expected behavior in CJA and is usually driven by session mechanics rather than a classification issue.

In CJA, the Internal Referrer channel is evaluated at session start. Whenever a session resets (for example due to cross-domain navigation, identity changes, consent updates, or session timeouts), the referring domain that triggered the new session is credited. If one internal site acts as a central hub or common handoff point, it will naturally contribute a much higher volume to the Internal Referrer channel.

Because this logic is implemented via a derived field, it reflects the referrer present at session start and does not distribute traffic across multiple internal domains within a single journey. As a result, internal referrer data is often skewed toward one or two key domains.

Best practice is to treat Internal Referrer as a diagnostic signal rather than an acquisition metric, ensure identity and session continuity across domains, and avoid expecting even distribution across internal sites.