We are noticing that first touch reporting is cannibalizing attribution from other sources into "Direct".
When I pull the raw data from DataFeed, we are noticing where a visitor has started to click around, and the click event is sent to Adobe, followed by the page view.
The click event has an empty post_referrer and post_url. Since they are first time visitors, the first click event are process by the marketing channel rules as direct and va_new_engagement is set to 1. This causes us to see a cannibalizing of visits into direct from other channels.
The last touch reporting, the direct channel, the visits metric is inflated. When we sum up all the visits from each channel, it comes out to be 40% greater than the actual # of visitors.
This seems to be a bug where first/last touch reporting is based on click event which doesn't have all the raw data so that va_new_engagement and va_instance_event can be correctly set.
Is there a way to make these 2 flags set based on first page view of the user's journey regardless if the link click happened before the page view event was captured and timestamp into Adobe's data warehouse?
