Unattributed channel suddenly our biggest channel despite editing our processing rules

[KristinCr]

Hey Adobe Community,
Long-time lurker, first-time poster to this community.  I've seen similar questions to this one but they didn't quite answer the issue so just sharing some nuances to pinpoint the issue.  We recently added 2 new marketing channels and processing rules to our global suite Marketing Channels, under our admin settings.  After that, unrelated, our "other campaign/unattributed" channel started collecting tracking codes that were not a part of the rule set for that channel.  We've been steadily adding to the ruleset for "other campaign/unattributed" to stop attribution to that channel but we're still  seeing a ton of "unspecified" traffic so that it's our most visited source, according to reporting and I don't think that's right yet.  Other campaigns/unattributed has never been our highest attributed channel.  According to our rule set, unattributed/other campaigns should be last in the processing order, so I'm not sure why there is still so much traffic for "other campaigns/unattributed." Have also split the rules into two to hopefully clean it up more.  Have included screenshots of some of the environment 

[VinayC]

For Unidentified channel conditons, just stick to ones where it says -
Tracking code exists,
CID exists

This way, if none of the other processing rules are matched by the conditions mentioned there, then only the traffic will be bucketed under this channel.

Let me know if this works.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Don't forget that Tracking Code and Marketing Channels usually have different attributions...

Marketing Channels are 30 days by default, and Tracking Code is 7 Days by default. If you are capturing the value of your CID as your Marketing Channel Detail, that will hold the same attribution as Marketing Channel and is better to pair with together to avoid mis-matched data sets.

How recently did you make some of these changes? Did you expire your Marketing Channel and reset your Tracking Code eVar so as to not allow data already attributed to skew your current results? If you are only looking at Marketing Channel, you may not need to reset the Tracking Code

You could still be looking at data collected up to 30 days ago. If your changes were made more than 30 days ago, some of the issue could still be trying to mix dimensions with different attribution models.

I do agree with @VinayC though, if all your other CIDs are being caught above, then you shouldn't need such complex results... unless you are specifically using them to drive specific Marketing Channel Details? That part of the screenshots is cut off.