I created a marketing channel segment, but when I break down by marketing channel, other channels appear. | Community
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HyunjiLee
Level 2
January 16, 2025
Question

I created a marketing channel segment, but when I break down by marketing channel, other channels appear.

  • January 16, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 1664 views

I created a marketing channel segment, but when I break down by marketing channel, other channels appear.

 

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2 replies

Isha Gupta
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Isha GuptaCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
January 16, 2025

Other Marketing Channels seems to be appearing only for Entries metric. If you will use any other metric such as Page Views or Occurrences you will not see other Marketing Channels appear. I think it's because Entries is a visit-based metric and the first value assigned to it for a visit, persists for that visit. I am not entirely sure why that is but maybe we can wait for other experts opinion on this. Meanwhile, I will dig deeper and will post here if I stumble onto a plausible explanation.

 

Best,

Isha

    H
    HyunjiLeeAuthor
    Level 2
    January 17, 2025

    Thank you for your kind explanation! From what I understood, when a visitor lands on a specific page, the most recent marketing channel should be attributed. However, I was confused because other marketing channels are also showing up. Even when I look at it by visitor ID, I don't understand why multiple marketing channels appear for a specific page. This is puzzling because I understood that it should be attributed to the most recent marketing channel.

     
      Jennifer_Dungan
      Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
      Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
      Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
      January 17, 2025

      I think this is just an oddity stemming from the use of a calculated dimension (entry page) and a calculated metric (entry)... 

       

      I was getting the same behaviour when I replicated your table in my data, but I can't really explain why...  and given that I know there could be many Marketing Channels per visit, I wouldn't use any "entry" since it wouldn't properly represent multiple channels within the same visit... 

        Jennifer_Dungan
        Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
        Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
        Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
        January 16, 2025

        The same visit can have multiple Marketing Channels, also, Marketing Channels have a default 30 day attribution.

         

        Let's look at a simple example:

         

        Visit:

        • On Social Media Site, click to site
        • Page A
          • Marketing Channel = Social
          • Marketing Channel Instance metric is triggered, due to the value being explicitly set
        • Page B
          • Marketing Channel "Social" is persisted due to attribution
          • Marketing Channel Instance metric is not triggered, since this is a persisted value
        • User is interested in something, and does a Google Search
        • Page C
          • Marketing Channel = "Organic Search"
          • Marketing Channel Instance metric is triggered, due to the value being explicitly set
        • Page D
          • Marketing Channel "Organic Search" is persisted due to attribution
          • Marketing Channel Instance metric is not triggered, since this is a persisted value
        • User then gets a Newsletter, and clicks on a link
        • Page E
          • Marketing Channel = "Email"
          • Marketing Channel Instance metric is triggered, due to the value being explicitly set

         

        Like @isha__gupta, I think there may be some oddities due to the calculation of the "Entry Page", and the Entries metric

         

         

        If I am understanding correctly, you are trying to see the pages where people entered the site using a specific Marketing Channel?

         

        I think you might be better building the following:

                Marketing Channel Instance
        Page       X
          Segment: Affiliate     Y
            Marketing Channel   Y
              Affiliate Y

        You don't need this exactly, but if you replicate your above using Page (instead of entry page) and Marketing Channel Instance (instead of entries), I think you will see the data show the way you expect... (i.e. you should only see Affiliate when you break out your Affiliate segment.

         

        The Marketing Channel Instance will only exist when the Marketing Channel is set, so this would be your entries vs your persisted channels.

          H
          HyunjiLeeAuthor
          Level 2
          January 17, 2025

          Thank you so much for your kind explanation! From what I understand, when a marketing channel is attributed to a specific page, only the most recent channel value should be recorded.

          For example, if during a 30-day period, the first visit to Page A was through Social, the second visit through Search (page A), and the third visit through Email(page A), shouldn't the marketing channel show only Email in this case?

          If I'm misunderstanding, please let me know! 😥


          Also, just to clarify, is a marketing channel instance not a single visit value, but rather a metric that gets recorded multiple times?

           

          I also have another question! In the example you mentioned, since each page has different sources of traffic, it makes sense that Social, Search, and Email would all be included. But when looking only at Page A, should the marketing channel show just Social as the single value?

          Jennifer_Dungan
          Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
          Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
          Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
          January 17, 2025

          Hi, Jennifer,

          Thank you for your kind help and the example you provided. I think I misunderstood that only the last channel should appear on a page! Your example made it clear for me! I really appreciate it.


          No worries, this is a common issue... Attribution can be a really hard thing to wrap one's head around. It took me a while as well... hence why I like to visualize it, so that its easier to see what is happening.

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