The page has not been promoted yet but there are still paid traffic entering directly to the page

[nphv]

Hi all,

When I track the source of traffic entering directly to a page (Entry Page devided by Last Touch Channel), there are visitors from paid channels.

However, we have not run any campaigns to drive traffic to the page.

How this is possible?

My theory is those visitors come from paid campaigns (they land in different pages), then they visit the tracking page during their session. But it confuses me why AA shows them entering the page directly?

[RobertBlakeley · Accepted solution]

The entry page is set on the first value in the dimension, in this case the "red" page. The entry value does not persist.

Last Touch Channel basically behaves like a persisted evar.

In the correlation, the Channel persistence attributes the last channel values to the entry page, the "red" page. The last Channel value could have happened later, as you theorized, and then is attributed to the entry page.

You could test this yourself by going to the site yourself and enter on a made up tracking code. Look at a couple of pages, then reenter the site in the same visit from Google. When the visit shows up in Workspace, filter the report for your tracking code and do your correlation. As you know exactly what you did in your visit, you can easily see the results of you Google last touch visit.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I agree, Marketing Channels have a default 30 day attribution.. so in a previous visit within the last 30 days, those users came to your site via paid campaigns, then later on entered the site on this page (as a direct traffic - meaning the marketing channel wouldn't get overwritten - direct by default will not override a more specific channel)

[nphv]

Thanks for the reply! 

Could you please further explain this? "the marketing channel wouldn't get overwritten - direct by default will not override a more specific channel"

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Oh of course... so if you look at your Marketing Channel Manager, there is a column for "Override Last-Touch Channel"

You can see that Direct and Override aren't usually checked...

So if a user did the following (assuming all of these are within 30 days):

• Visit 1 - Direct
  • Marketing Channel will be "Direct"
• Visit 2 - Paid Search
  • Last Touch Marketing Channel will be overwritten to "Paid Search"
• Visit 3 - Organic Social
  • Last Touch Marketing Channel will be overwritten to "Organic Social"
• Visit 4 - Direct
  • Last Touch Marketing Channel will stay "Organic Social", since Organic Social is a specific campaign rule, and Direct is set to not override the value - this way your conversions will be tied to a more specific last touch campaign

You can of course change that, but I am not sure why... as this would pretty much kill the 30 day attribution, as every visit will override the Last Touch Marketing Channel.

[nphv]

So I understand that Marketing Channel is the one changing. How about Entry Page?

Stay on your example:

Visit 1 - Direct & Entry Page = Page A

Visit 2 - Paid Search & Entry Page = Page B

Visit 3 - Organic Social & Entry Page = Page C

Visit 4 - Direct & Entry Page = Page D

-> At this point, visitor will be contributed as:

Channel: Organic Social

But which Entry Page? Page A / Page C / Page D 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Entry Page is a visit level dimension... all of those pages will be "entry" pages for each visit.

Now, if you are looking at a specific channel, like "Organic Social" (which is set on Visit 3, and carried forward to visit 4), and you want to see the page where the user directly came in from Organic Search, you would want to look at the Marketing Channel Instances metric.. this will be applied to the page where the Marketing Channel is actually set (not just applied through attribution)

^ I wouldn't even use "Entry Page" in this case... as Entry Page is the first page of a visit but a user may have multiple Marketing Channels within the same visit... (user opens a newsletter, then checks social media and clicks into the site, then does a Google Search - all within 30 minutes making this one visit have multiple marketing entry points - but "Entry Page" will only record the page from the newsletter as this is the first page of the visit).

Just apply "Page" to the Marketing Channel Instance metric and you will see all "landing pages" where Marketing Channels have been applied.