Questions on Marketing Channels results/configuration
Hi! In my company we have set up the marketing channels in the best way, but the results I see from workspace do not convince me and I think there are errors in the processing rules, but I do not know how to solve them.
The main anomalies I see in the data are:
The main anomalies I see in the data are:
- 55% of the audience of the marketing channel "direct" is from Referrer Type "Search Engines", specifically the majority comes from Google.
In the Processing Rules "direct" is my last rule, and above it are the rules for the "search" channels. I share the configuration of the rules:
Here you can see the order of the rules:
Here the configuration of both "Search" channels:
"Direct" Marketing Channel:
Why if we have specified in the "Search" rules to collect the data "Matches Natural Search Detection Rules" not all "Search" traffic is collected in the corresponding channels and falls into "Direct"?
Thank you!
Hi,
I see a few questionable rules in your screenshots...
First off, I don't understand why you have the "First Hit of Visit" applied to any of your search rules... Many times users will prefer to use search engines to find content on your site mid-visit... so restricting your rules to "only the first hit" is likely going to cause some abnormal tracking results.
I am guessing you have a reason to split your Organic Search into Brand and Keyword... I can see that you are classifying your Marketing Channel by the type of content where the user landed... but I am not sure the benefit of that (however, that is a call only you can make - but I since you can breakdown Marketing Channels by your content type, using Marketing Channel Instance to see where the user actually landed when they came to the site... this seems slightly over complicated... but again, this is your call)
"First Hit of Visit" is really usually just reserved for Direct and Internal rules, to ensure that internal pages don't accidentally trigger Marketing Channel logic.
I am also not sure you need two "Direct" rules, at least based on what you are showing. Referrer Type, when coming from any non-internal URL, will always show "Typed Bookmarked" (unless it's traffic in your mobile app, which may not be setting referrer at all - at least this was the behaviour of the old ACP SDK... the newer AEP SDK, since it shares logic with WebSDK it should natively trigger a type/bookmarked referrer type...
I don't think your second Direct traffic rule would ever trigger to be honest...
Normally, you would just have a general rule like:
Now, in my case, I also added:
Since I noticed some strange traffic coming from people's computers (where they had saved a copy of the page to their hard drive and were opening it locally... so this just forced that to also be treated as Direct; but this may not be an issue for you....
I should also ask, you have ensured that Internal and Direct traffic don't override other "specific" channels correct?
If you have changed these default settings, I can understand why you have "First Hit of Visit" on all your rules.. but that is definitely going to cause issues with your data... these two items should remain unchecked to ensure that your 30 day (default) or custom Marketing Channel attribution is maintained.
Oh, I see you reposted in English (for the record I wasn't ignoring you, I was just super busy and this question has a lot to unpack)
We are also an online Newspaper if that helps.
1. I have used ‘first hit of visit’ because for me it is important to collect the channels from where they access at visit level and not at URL level. In this way I wanted to make sure that the external reference of the traffic is collected. I have always had doubts about whether it was necessary or not, but the results fit me better when I put it in. So can you confirm that I don't need it, and that it is automatically collected at the visit level?
The problem with this is that fundamentally, you can have multiple different referrals to a site within the same visit. Restricting to "first hit of visit" mean that all the other referrals will get lost and collected in your catchall "None" bucket.
Let's look at an example:
Visit:
- (User performs a Search)
- Page 1 - (first hit of visit)
- Marketing Channel set to "organic search"
- Marketing Channel Instance triggered
- Page 2
- Marketing Channel persists value "organic search"
- Marketing Channel Instance not triggered
- (User gets a Marketing Email)
- Page 3...
You don't want to ignore your Marketing Email because it's not the "first hit of the visit", same with if the user went back and did another search, but this time clicked on a Paid Search link.....
You want to collect all your Marketing Channels, and then you can look at them by Visit (where you could have 1 or many channels for the same visit), or you can look at them by Marketing Channel Instance (each instance the site was entered), you can also look at cross channel attribution.
If you restrict all your rules to "First Hit of Visit" then you're going to get a lot of referral data fall into the "None" channel that will be a mix of everything that wasn't properly classified above, and in some cases, you might lose channels altogether....
I mean, it's up to you in the end... but given that users rarely have a single entry point during a visit; I would be cautious of creating such tight restrictions in my rules (which is why I questioned it in the first place, and still stand by that now)....
2. About the division between organic brand or keyword search, it is important for us because we want to know who is searching for us by name or by pure SEO. The only way we have always found to differentiate between them is by "content type", as it is very difficult to differentiate by keyword.
Lol, fair enough... since Keywords barely work now, save for a few random search engines that no one uses... Google stopped sharing Keywords back in 2016....
This is again a decision for you, personally, I would probably opt to keep my Marketing Channels clean with a simple "Organic Search" distinction, then if I want to see the people that land directly on specific content pages using "Content Type" as the breakdown, and Marketing Channel Instance Metric stacked with Organic Search Marketing Channel.
Something like this:
Simply because it's easier to break something down, then to add it together... and if you need to look at all Organic Search, having it divided is a bit more effort to combine....
3. About "Direct". For us this channel is very important, in fact the most important. As a media company, we are very interested in knowing who accesses our website because they know us and want to consume our news because of who we are, because they like our brand. I know the "override last touch channel" option, but if I understand it correctly, leaving it empty assigns the traffic to the previous channel in that period of time, making the "direct" traffic minimal, and we are not interested in that. I understand that in an e-commerce business the "direct" channel is not so important and it makes sense in this case, to know the efficiency of the campaigns.
I completely agree! But this is why I use a combination of Marketing Channels (7 Day Attribution**), Tracking Code (7 Day Attribution), Referrers (Visit and Instance Attribution) and Custom Visit Level Campaign Tracking (Visit and Instance Attribution).
This way, I can pull out different attribution models for different teams... some teams like the Marketing (depending on what they are looking at) want to see the 7 Day model or the Direct model.
** Marketing Channels have a default attribution of 30 Days, but you can change this setting to suite your needs... for us, 30 Days was too long, but 7 Days was good because a lot of times, a marketing email would go out, people would check it but not immediately convert to being a subscriber... However, they might come back to the site directly and convert that week; so it allowed us to tie some of that "direct visit" conversion to those marketing emails... IF we need to check 30 Day attribution, I can always use the custom attribution models in my workspace (which work better to scale up than down).
Basically, I don't generally use Marketing Channel data if I am specifically looking at for Direct.
I hope this helps.
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