How to Properly Set Up Marketing Channels in Adobe Analytics

If your website uses Adobe Analytics as a measurement tool and you want to make sure your traffic channels are set up correctly, you’re in luck—because we’re going to tell you what Adobe hasn’t told you but should have.

Properly configuring marketing channels in any analytics tool is essential—especially if you’re investing in paid channels—so you can identify which campaigns are performing best and optimize your return on investment.

By default, Adobe Analytics uses last-click attribution, although it offers various attribution models beyond first- and last-touch, making it a much more powerful tool than similar ones (in addition to many other reasons). These models are:

• Final touch: Attribute 100% of the credit to the last channel before conversion.
• First touch: Attributes 100% of the credit to the user’s first channel within the applied lookback window.
• Linear: Assigns equal credit to all participating channels.
• Attribution: Assigns 100% of the credit to each channel, which will increase the number of conversions under this model.
• Same touch: Assigns 100% of the credit to the conversion touchpoint, so if there is no touchpoint, it will be grouped under “none.”
• U-shape: 40% of the credit goes to the first channel, another 40% to the last, and the remaining 20% to the other channels in between.
• J-shape: Allocates 60% to the last channel, 20% to the first, and the remaining 20% among the other channels. If there were only two channels, then 75% would go to the last one and 25% to the first.
• Inverted J-shape: As the name suggests, this is the opposite of the previous one. 60% for the first channel, 20% for the last channel, and the remaining 20% distributed among the other channels. If there were only two channels, 25% would go to the last channel and 75% to the first.
• Time Decay: A time decay is applied; the value of each channel depends on the amount of time that elapses between the start of the touchpoint and the final conversion.
• Custom: Allows you to specify the value for the first channel, the last channel, and the remaining channels.

On the website of Adobe , you can find more information on this topic. That is not the focus of this post. In this article, we want to focus on the processing rules in the configuration of marketing channels in Adobe Analytics.

Once we’ve created our channels, it will be time to define them using the processing rules.

The next step is to go to the processing rules. To do this, we’ll navigate there again from “Edit Settings ->marketing channels -> marketing channel processing rules.”

This is a key point, because here we’ll tell the tool which channel we want it to assign the visits to, based on what we decide.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the rules will be processed in sequential order—that is , from top to bottom—for each hit. Therefore, if a rule has been satisfied, the system will not move on to the next one. However, if a rule is not satisfied, the system will move from one rule to the next in sequence until it satisfies one.

1. Condition or conditions, and decide whether it is sufficient for one to be met or for all to be met.
2. So what should you do? Choose the channel where that traffic will be directed and specify the details of that channel. Choose from among the many variables offered by the tool.

If we focus on the channel configuration recommended by Adobe, it uses URL parameters.

Other, more advanced configurations use a tracking code instead of a query parameter.

However, if you use custom links (events), this configuration won’t work for you.

Yes, you heard right—we’re not pulling your leg.

It turns out that Adobe processes the channels on every hit, so if you’re using one of these two variables to configure them, they’re likely being assigned incorrectly.

Since these two methods simply check the value of an internal variable called post_pagename_no_url, which stores the URL value. However, for these two types, that variable is empty, so it does not assign the conversion to the relevant channel. This results in losing track of the campaign.

All of this is very confusing; it took us several support tickets with Adobe before we figured out the reason. And The only way to check this is by extracting the data using the data feed and checking whether the event conversions are being attributed correctly or not.

Until you extract them and start digging around, you’re completely at ease, thinking that everything is set up correctly because you’re following Adobe’s own instructions, which are available to everyone.

We’re going to present a case study to help you understand this better.

The image above shows the third visit by a unique user who arrived via an email campaign.

The hits corresponding to a page view are highlighted in green; as you can see, these are the only ones where the `post_pagename_no_url` variable has a value.

The rows are arranged sequentially so that the user’s navigation can be viewed in order.

In yellow, we have:

• va_closer: The channel index, corresponding to the channels that appear in the marketing channel manager we saw in the first screenshot.
• va_closer_detail: The channel detail that is set within the processing rules above, in the last part where it says “set the channel’s value to”“. What it does is retrieve the value of the variable you’ve selected, which, as mentioned, would typically be the URL parameter or the tracking code.
• campaign: This is the value of the tracking code.
• post_page_no_url: The variable that Adobe uses if one of those two options is selected, to take them into account. If no value is assigned to it, then even if those variables have the correct value, Adobe will ignore them.

Now that we know all this, we can analyze the table above.

The user arrives at a landing page via a URL that contains campaign parameters. You can see how the campaign is assigned a value and how the channel details and the visit channel are correctly assigned to the email.

A moment later, an event is triggered on the same page, with the same tags. If this event counts as a conversion for us, that’s when all hell breaks loose.

It turns out that the `post_page_no_url` variable is left blank in these types of hits, and since our configuration relies on either the tracking code or the query parameter, it checks to see if that variable has a value. If it doesn’t, it ignores those two variables that contained the campaign tags.

So what it does is look at the referral source, and since this is an email campaign, it detects that the visitor came from Gmail and attributes the conversion to the “referral” channel instead of the “email” channel. This causes us to lose track of our campaign.

If you’ve made it this far without your head exploding, congratulations! If you’re freaking out and worried that your channels are assigned incorrectly, you can relax—we’re going to give you the solution, and it’s very simple.

Instead of using URL parameters or the tracking code, you have to use an evar. Yes, I know, the tracking code is supposed to be evar0, but apparently that one doesn’t count, which is why it doesn’t work. But I can assure you that if you store the campaign tagging in another evar, it will work. Here’s an example:

On this user’s third visit, they enter via the email channel; the visit is assigned correctly, just as it was before. And now you can see how the conversion—using a different variable (in this case, evar103)—maintains the correct tagging in the detail view, thereby attributing the event conversion to the correct channel.

The solution to avoid this type of misattribution problem is to use an evar that contains the same value as the tracking code.

After that, you can rest assured that your settings will be perfect—and keep enjoying Adobe!

We hope you’ve found this very helpful, and remember that if you don’t use custom links, you don’t need to make any changes of this kind—the URL parameters or tracking code should be set up correctly.

Sara Pascual
Data Technical Analyst