Last touch channel discrepancy - breaking down visits by last touch channel

[colek93887464]

Hi when looking at my workspace with last touch channel as the dimension and visits as a metric, the total of the row items is not adding up to the total displayed in the workspace.

From my understanding only one last touch channel should be attributed to a visit (hence the name, last touch), but when looking at the report in this way I'm seeing a fairly large discrepancy when summing the row items (screenshot below).

Is adobe technically displaying here multiple last touch channels per visit? If so, what is the reasoning behind this? if i wanted to see multiple channels a user interacted with throughout a visit, I'd use a different dimension that isn't using last touch attribution.

Any help on this would be much appreciated !

[Urs_Boller · Accepted solution]

actually you have a "last touch channel" for each hit, not each visit. that means a visit can have more than one "last touch channels" and that's the reason why the total does not match the sum of rows.

and that makes totally sense to have "last touch channel at hit level. assume the following case of a single user within a visit:

SEA => buy => Newsletter => buy

looking at the "buy"-events I want to see both "last touch channels (each a 1) and not the "last touch channel" of the whole visit.

hope that helps

[fsakjlfdsakljfd]

To elaborate on what Urs said:
In google analytics the presence of a new UTM parameter instantiates a new visit.  That is not true within Adobe.
In Adobe analytics only two things end a visit with default settings; 30 minutes of inactivity or 12 hours of continuous activity.
Compare visits and instances in Adobe Analytics

This is the intended behavior and a key advantage of Adobe.  That one out of every 22 visits to your site is multi channel is super meaningful - this could be a sign that your on-site search is suboptimal and people are relying on google search.  Of that users can't find promotional items on your site and are going back to emails to find additional info.

Conversion events on the other hand are only attributed to one channel, as Urs said the channel is applied at a hit level. 

[srola]

To add further to what Urs mentioned. Each Marketing Channel is evaluated on a "hit" level. Furthermore, channel override factor is something that needs to be accounted for. If this setting is enabled, you are giving the Marketing Channels permissions to override previously set Marketing Channel within that same visit.

[colek93887464]

hi thank you for the responses. but what about when looking at specific hits... lets say with last touch channel = organic and visits as the metric. Is this (below screenshot) specifically only looking at hits where organic was the last touch channel at the moment in time (in the hit the page was loaded) or the last touch channel just had to be set to organic at any point throughout the visit?

visit 1 - paid search-->page x --> organic-->page y

              last touch channel = organic

URL           Visits

page x          ??

would visits be incremented by 1 (above) since during the visit in which page x was viewed organic was at one point a last touch channel? or would it not show any values since it's looking at just when the hit happened for page x in which case the row item would not be incremented by 1 since paid search was the last touch channel at that point?

[fsakjlfdsakljfd]

In the example you provided above, organic would be the last touch channel for page y (assuming you enable organic to override paid).  Its the last channel set prior to seeing page y.

If you use a 'hit level segment', the view of 'page y' would only be attributed to organic.
If you instead used a 'visit level segment' the view of both pages could be attributed to organic.

One thing that you might find immensely valuable is to request a day of data feeds.  Looking at the raw row level data makes it easier to understand how va_closer_id is set and persisted.

[fsakjlfdsakljfd]

[colek93887464]

hi thank you for the responses.. but what about when looking at specific hits... like the example below when using a segment, visits metric and page dimension. id assume the page x visits would be zero since there was no hit with organic and page x?

visit 1 - paid search-->page x --> organic-->page y

     segment applied- hit level-last touch channel = organic

URL           Visits

page x          ??