Confirming my understanding on Marketing Channel and Marketing Channel Instance

[xiaoming123]

i went through this article, Solved: Marketing Channel Visits vs Marketing Channel Inst... - Adobe Experience League Community - ... and would like to confirm on my understanding on marketing channel and marketing channel instance.

Scenario of customer visiting website: 

Customer lands on www.domain.com/attraction-pass through NATURAL SEARCH at 1000

Customer lands on www.domain.com/hotels through DIRECT at 1015

Customer lands on www.domain.com/flights through PAID SEARCH at 1020

My understanding on AA reporting measured:

• Marketing Channel can be either last touch or first touch attribution, hence i listed both down for clarity of the attribution behavior.
• Marketing Instance will only be measured on the actual click-in action.
• All page view will be count as individual occurrences but dedupe into a single visit. 

Base page link	Marketing Channel (Last Touch)	Marketing Channel (First Touch)	Marketing Channel Instances	Visits
www.domain.com/attraction-pass	DIRECT	NATURAL SEARCH	1	1
www.domain.com/attraction-pass	DIRECT	PAID SEARCH	0	1
www.domain.com/attraction-pass	DIRECT	DIRECT	0	1
www.domain.com/hotels	DIRECT	NATURAL SEARCH	0	1
www.domain.com/hotels	DIRECT	PAID SEARCH	0	1
www.domain.com/hotels	DIRECT	DIRECT	1	1
www.domain.com/flights	DIRECT	NATURAL SEARCH	0	1
www.domain.com/flights	DIRECT	PAID SEARCH	1	1
www.domain.com/flights	DIRECT	DIRECT	0	1

Can any experts help to advise if i have understand the abovementioned wrongly?

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

There is also the matter of IF you allow DIRECT to overwrite other channels... by default it generally doesn't...

So if a user did this behaviour:

1. Opened www.domain.com/attraction-pass from Natural Search
   • Marketing Channel would be set to Natural Search
2. Then the user opens www.domain.com/hotels from Direct (within your Marketing Channel period, which would likely be 7 days or 30 days - two most common setups)
   • The Marketing Channel would remain Natural Search (both first and last touch)... no Marketing Channel instance would be set for Direct, as Direct is configured to not override other channels, Direct will only be set if no other Marketing Channel is set for the user
3. Then the user opens www.domain.com/flights through Paid Search (again within the specified Marketing Channel period)
   1. The Marketing Channel will be set now to Paid Search... for that Visitor / Visit, the First Touch would be Natural Search, the Last Touch would be Paid Search... 
   2. However, for the individual pages, I think that www.domain.com/attraction-pass would still be tied to Natural Search... as that page was only seen in that context.... www.domain.com/flights last touch would definitely be Paid Search, I am not sure about First Touch...I think it would still be Paid Search, as this page was first associated to "Paid"

To be honest, I don't tend to look specifically at pages in conjunction with Marketing Channels... when I am looking at Pages, I prefer to look at the actual Referrer/Referrer Type/Campaign Instances.. what specifically brought people to this page, or as part of the specific visit... as opposed to a 7 or 30 day attribution window.

I use Marketing Channels more for Visitor patterns, or for Conversions... what lead the users to convert (make a purchase, register an account, sign up for a newsletter, etc)... Basically actions that more than just the visit would contribute to... like a Marketing Email, the first visit the user may just be curious, but want to further research it... then maybe they come back via a search, and came through one of our paid search campaigns... 

Don't forget, with Custom Attribution modelling you can look at more than just first and last touch... those are key values that Adobe has tracked by default for a long time... but in Workspace you can apply on the fly attribution modelling...  you can look at Participation models, or Time Decay models.. you can increase your attribution lookback window... maybe your Marketing Channels are set to 30 days by default, but you have a campaign that is running for 6 months... you can do a custom attribution to look at 6 months of data.

[xiaoming123]

Thanks Jennifer for pointing out Direct will not override any channels by default. 

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@Jennifer_Dungan wrote:
2. However, for the individual pages, I think that www.domain.com/attraction-pass would still be tied to Natural Search... as that page was only seen in that context.... www.domain.com/flights last touch would definitely be Paid Search, I am not sure about First Touch...I think it would still be Paid Search, as this page was first associated to "Paid"

For www.domain.com/attraction-pass i think the override logic would be updated to Paid Search if default marketing channel attribution is used (last touch) based on my understanding from other thread:

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-analytics-questions/override-last-touch-chann... 

In my case, i would actually need page, marketing channel and referral domain to analysis the traffic since a referrer (e.g. Google) can be from a paid search/natural search and i'm using marketing instance to identify the channel that is actually used for the visit. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

It might be... it might not.. that other thread talks about the visit as a whole... The best way to understand how the attribution works is to actually test it....  open an incognito window, follow the various flows you indicated (all within a single incognito session - as in don't close the window - by you can leave your site)

Hopefully you are recording your ECID so you can use that as a filter to identify and segment your traffic specifically, or you will have to add a custom ?test=me (something very clearly isolated to you) to one of the URLs so that you can create a visitor segment that isolates your specific tests.

Wait for the data to process, then check where each of those pages identify.