Why Channel Data Can Vary Between Adobe Advertising and Marketing Channels

Last update: March 20, 2023

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A common question from users learning about the integration of the Adobe Advertising and Marketing Channels data sets is “What causes the variance in data between the AMO ID and Marketing Channels?” Or, sometimes, “Why is the data broken? I need all metrics to match across the reports.” Fortunately, discrepancies don’t indicate that the data is "broken,” and discrepancies are expected and even desired. Let’s look at why the integration was designed this way.

The two data sets have different primary use cases:

  • Marketing Channels: The primary use case for Marketing Channels is to compare data across multiple channels with a common attribution model. Analysts can use the Marketing Channel dimension to gain increased insights into how channels are interacting with each other. This insight can help fuel macro-level decisions on how to invest in each channel and can lead to insights on how visitors from each channel interact with the website.

    The Analytics Marketing Channel dimension, therefore, is configured to capture and track all channels. Marketing Channels can also be configured to capture Advertising DSP view-throughs and click-throughs, and it does so in relation to the other marketing channels.

  • Adobe Advertising AMO ID: The primary use case of the Adobe Advertising AMO ID data is to feed the advanced Adobe Sensei-powered bidding algorithms. The algorithms automatically make thousands of micro-level bid decisions made daily to maximize advertising spend and to achieve the goals of the DSP campaign or the Search, Social, & Commerce portfolio. The more conversion data the algorithms can connect campaigns to, the better the algorithms can make these bidding decisions.

    To collect this data, the Analytics for Advertising integration passes raw AMO IDs that can be translated as click-through and view-through tracking codes in the AMO ID dimension of Adobe Analytics — which is stored either as a custom variable (eVar) or a reserved variable (rVar). Click-throughs for other channels aren’t set in the AMO ID dimension, so the AMO ID dimension is unable to track entry from these other channels. The result is that the AMO ID persists through Marketing Channels entry points.

For more information about possible data variances between Adobe Advertising-tracked data and Analytics-tracked data, see “Expected Data Variances Between Analytics and Adobe Advertising.”

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