Basic Marketing Channel question (maybe) Please chime in!

[ptrost]

First: I inherited a bit of a mess, but am excited to learn and clean it up. Please excuse any mis-speaking or wrong terms.

I'm in the process of evolving our channel reporting and evolving the department to Adobe "Marketing Channel" reporting.

We currently have a couple eVars that track first and last touch channels, plus another eVar that was created to track last-touch on another set of our tracking codes. Analytics is currently set to gather and bucket our created "ADIDs" into Market Channels through a manual process in Salesforce and custom logic in Launch. This needs to change. I've watched all the Youtube videos and replayed webinars, so am ready to make the transition.

My question for the group:

For a retail business that has 8-10 product categories and less than 100 products, uses paid search, paid media, paid social, display, emails, plus has organic traffic as well - how many (and which) Marketing channels do you recommend? I'd like to give the departments a channel>subchannel type arrangement to limit the main channels to a dozen or so (down from 24!). I'd be utilizing Marketing Channel Detail, as well as Classifications to hopefully follow a best-practice way to do all this.

Thanks in advance anybody!

[yuhuisg · Accepted solution]

The ones that are found in almost every AA setup:

• Direct
• Natural Search
• Paid Search
• Email
• Social
• Referrals
• Internal Domains

If you're big in advertising, then you might also have:

• Display
• Paid Social, i.e. from ads that are run in Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. as opposed to the links in posts

If you have affiliate marketing:

• Affiliate

Everything else will be business-specific. E.g. if you do a lot of outdoor advertising, maybe you'd have:

• Outdoor
• Print

You could also look into the existing Marketing Channels report that you have, with the Visits metric (and maybe 1-2 important metrics) and see how big those numbers are for some of the channels over an extended period of time, e.g. 1 year. For those that are miniscule, you might have a case for consolidating them.