Marketing Channels Natural Search (Organic) is underreporting

[#1]

I am attempting to set up our Marketing Channel definitions and am not getting the Organic channel to populate. I was looking for 'campaign code is not set' AND search engine exists. This rule was prior to the rule to catch any remaining traffic with a referring domain into "referring domain'. From looking at our clickstream data it seems that the only traffic making into the Organic channel are those with the old-style referrers that include query string parameters like "https://www.google.com/search?q=what+are+mainstay+suites&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-m". Why would that be?

I updated the rule to not even care about the campaign code since that traffic should be caught earlier and only look to see if Search Engine exists and I still have the same issue. 

A rule that is lower in the processing takes all referrers and puts it into referring domains where the bulk of our 'google.com' and 'bing.com' referrers are going rather than being captured into the "Organic" marketing channel.  What do I need to do differently?

[valerie_anders · Accepted solution]

Dear valerie_anders,

Need to see the rule. Can you share the screengrab here?

Why would you need to have a different rule for Natural Search? Can you try to use Adobe's Recommended Rule from the below link?

Link: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/marketing-channels/c-rules.html?lang=en

Thanks, Arun

[valerie_anders · Accepted solution]

I will change my rule to look at Natural Search Detection instead and see if that fixes it.  But it does seem odd that this wouldn't catch the referring domains like 'www.google.com' prior to the referring domains rule.

I actually just looked at the "Traffic Sources" reports in SiteCatalyst.  We never use them since we have been using Unified Sources Vista Rules for years.  The "Natural Search" within the traffic sources reports are seriously underreporting as well and look to closely mimic what we are currently seeing in the Marketing Channel "Organic" (Natural Search) channel.  For paid search, we key off the following url parameters, "mc, promo or source".  Within the Unified Sources Vista rule, the traffic that is seen as "google - organic" matches what we are seeing as the Last Touch channel for Organic.

I believe the issue is that we have Unified Sources - Vista rules running.  and they were built using the old style definition of search engines where there had to be a properly formatted query string with the referrer to count as a 'search engine' otherwise it was assumed that somebody clicked on a banner ad or something from the search engine.

Assuming that I am correct,how can we still use our Vista rules and have the Marketing Channels use the new style definition of Search Engines?  We cannot just turn off the Vista rules since that is actually what we have been using for years and what we currently use for corporate reporting and bid adjustments.

[PratheepArunRaj · Accepted solution]

Marketing Channels are applied after VISTA, so, if you set the rules correctly in Marketing Channel Processing Rules, it should work. You change the rule and let me know. If there are errors, there are issues with the default 'referrer' capture.

[valerie_anders · Accepted solution]

I made the change and that didn't fix it. I looked at only first time visits to the site for the last hour and I am still getting search engines saved into Referring Domains. The only search engines making it into the "Organic" channel are those where the referrer is a search engine and also has old-style formatted query strings.