Flow Visualization, Orders by Marketing Channel Not Adding Up?

[MatthewBe7]

Hi,

I am trying to analyze the impact of different marketing channels / campaigns. I've noticed that a lot of our orders are coming from Direct & Session refresh, making it difficult to determine the drivers of these orders.

I had the idea of using a Flow visualization for orders (purchase event) by marketing channels, so I could see which channel users are first learning about us, and then where they end up falling into eventually.

The problem: when I see the orders # at the last stage of the flow, it shows 5475 orders. However, if I look at a freeform table, and breakdown marketing channel by orders, I see a total of 7,760 orders. What is the reason for this discrepancy? Is this data at least directionally valuable? FYI I am looking at the same date range.

Thank you!

[SumitK4]

For your first part fo the question, best practice of marketing channel is that the "override last-touch" functionality should be unchecked for ''Direct' and '''Session Refresh' to maintain the correctness of last-touch attribution across all channels. so that they can’t take credit from other persisting last touch channels (or each other). Check out this video and skip to 7:19 to learn about this- Marketing Channels in Adobe Analytics

For your second part, need to see the screenshot of your flow visualisation and your marketing channel report to better answer, but  my assumption is without looking at your report, if a visitor interacts with marketing channels in different sessions, the flow will only show the path taken within the session/eventual path where the order occurred. The Freeform table will attribute the order to all interacted channels overall.