Marketing Channel Details for Paid and Natural Search

[Michael_Wills]

So, for both Paid and Natural Search processing rules, I am setting the channel's value to "Search Engine + Search Keyword(s)", which according to this page is defined as follows:

Here's an example of what I am seeing over a 6-month period of data for both Paid and Natural Search.

I have a couple of questions I am hoping you can please help me with.

1. In Paid Search, I am seeing a lot of "None" - what might be the cause of that?

2. The value for "search_keyword" in the : delimited "Search Engine + Search Keyword(s)" string is consistently "::empty::" for both Paid and Natural Search (as shown above). Obviously this is useless information. Is this a bug/limitation with "Search Engine + Search Keyword(s)", or is there something else that might be contributing to this issue here?

Many thanks,

Michael

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Hi,

1. In Paid Search, I am seeing a lot of "None" - what might be the cause of that?

It's possible that those are coming from links where the referrer has been suppressed though the use of rel="noreferrer" or people opening the link in a new tab? Or, you have links that contain your paid search campaigns coming from non-search engines and your Marketing Channel rule(s) is built in such a way that it's allowing it and sorting it into your Paid Search... 

I would review all your Marketing Channel Rules to make sure that you don't have a logic hole that is allowing non-search data to come through... 

2. The value for "search_keyword" in the : delimited "Search Engine + Search Keyword(s)" string is consistently "::empty::" for both Paid and Natural Search (as shown above). Obviously this is useless information. Is this a bug/limitation with "Search Engine + Search Keyword(s)", or is there something else that might be contributing to this issue here?

"Search Keywords" is very old... it still kind of works with a few minor search engines, but unfortunately most search engines no longer pass this information... this isn't a bug with Adobe, but rather a result of Search Engines changing the way they worked over a decade ago.... 

I assume that Adobe has left this in, to catch the few Search Engines that still pass the data, but also potentially for users who want to get Data extractions from Google Search console and import them as an external data source.

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/dimensions/search-keyword.html?lang=en 

I changed the Marketing Channel Detail on our rules to just show the Search Engine... you are right, with most of these returning no values, it's pretty useless.

[Michael_Wills]

This is a great response. Thank you @Jennifer_Dungan for the context and tips. We're currently in the process of reviewing our processing rule logic, so this will definitely help us with further optimisation. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're very welcome

We've been working a similar Marketing Channel cleanup... it's always a good idea to periodically review and make sure that everything is running smoothly.

Good luck!