First touch channel
The ‘First touch channel’ dimension reports the first marketing channel a visitor matches with during that visitor’s engagement period (30 days by default). This dimension is valuable in understanding which marketing channels drive initial traffic to your site, allowing you to focus marketing efforts in areas that are most effective.
Populate this dimension with data
This dimension is derived by Marketing channel processing rules. It directly references channel names that you have defined in the Marketing channel manager. Every hit runs through your report suite’s Marketing channel processing rules in numeric order until it finds a match, which ties that marketing channel to the hit. There is no variable to set.
The first touch channel persists with the visitor until they don’t visit the site for longer than the visitor engagement period (30 days by default).
If you want to set this dimension to a specific value, the following steps are required:
- Set the desired dimension item as a channel in the Marketing channel manager under Report suite settings.
- Set a Marketing channel processing rule that contains the desired criteria for the hit.
- The visitor’s hit to your site must match the criteria outlined in the Marketing channel processing rule, and must be the first marketing channel value to do so in the visitor’s engagement period.
If a subsequent hit matches criteria under a different Marketing channel, this dimension is not overwritten with the new marketing channel.
Dimension items
Dimension items include any channel name in the Marketing channel manager. By default, values include "Paid search", "Natural search", "Display", "Email", "Affiliate", "Direct", "Internal", "Social networks", and "Referring domains". You can add or delete channels in the Marketing channel manager, which affect this dimension’s values.