Create marketing channel processing rules

In this video, I’ll be demonstrating how to set up processing roles for marketing channels reports in the Adobe Analytics Admin Council. By configuring marketing channels and their associated processing roles, you’ll understand the attribution of paid and non-paid traffic sources to your website. This includes native first and last touch metrics, as well as other standard conversion metrics. There are three main steps to produce this reporting. We’ll cover the last step in this video. The first two steps are covered in a different video. Before we get into the demonstration, let’s do a quick recap for readiness considerations. First, the business requirements. At the time you collected these before you set up your marketing channels, you may have already documented details about how paid marketing clicks past dated to your site’s page is. If you haven’t done this, you’ll need to do so before working in the processing rules interface. This slide outlines the type of questions, you’ll need to understand. Next, the Report Suite, you’ll use for processing rules configuration. The Report Suite or Suites, or the Report Suite template, will require marketing channel set up before their corresponding processing roles. I’ll show you where to verify this, when we step into the user interface. Now, at this point, you may be wondering what is a processing role. At a high level, processing roles are a backend way of modifying an analytics hit coming in from your data collection. It’s an effective way of augmenting or updating your analytics data without support from your IT or development teams. Even though this feature reduces your reliance on technical implementation, we recommend you review your setup at least twice a year to make sure it continues to reflect your organization’s business requirements. Okay, let’s get started in the user interface. Let’s select Admin and then Report Suites.

On the Report Suite Manager page, we’re going to select a Report Suite that already has marketing channels defined. You can verify this for yourself by choosing edit settings, marketing channels, and then marketing channel manager. However, we’re going to be working in the marketing channel processing rules interface today. So, I’m going to choose that now.

This is the marketing channels processing rules configuration screen. You’ll notice some processing rules already exist. If auto setup was used to define any number of your marketing channels, baseline processing rules will be automatically set up for those channels. Now, you should review each to confirm they align with the proper criteria. And my demonstration is going to use a mix of both auto and manual setup. So, first we’re going to look at the page search processing rule, and we’ll expand that. The top part of the rule is the condition. And this tells us what to look at to detect a click from a marketing channel. Let’s click on the list to see what’s available, so we can see items under Adobe detected, hit attributes, and then also conversion variables.

My rules use the settings from page search detection. And this is set up in a different area of the admin council. At the bottom, we can select a value we want to use for the marketing channel, which is set to page search as it should. And then what we want to use for the channel’s value. This is going to be the most granular value for this type of click. And this is commonly the tracking code for paid campaigns. Now, let’s change that to tracking code under conversion variables, and now let’s collapse the rule.

All right, after the last rule, we can add a new rule set. If you created marketing channels beyond those offered an auto setup, you’ll need to make annually add these new rules. All right, so now what I’m going to do, where it says select type is I’m going to choose custom and we’re going to be setting up promotional emails. Now, let’s say these links pass a tracking code in the URL that always begins with EM_P. And then let’s also say that the current data collection sets the variable for tracking code with this value already. The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to change the operator to the right of tracking code to starts with. And then that’s going to show a text box, where we can enter EM_P.

There we go.

And then at the very bottom, we’re going to choose the marketing channel and that’s going to be promotional emails, and then we’re going to choose tracking code under conversion variables. Okay, now we’re going to do another rule using a different condition. I’m going to set up the rule for acquisition emails. Now, in this example, let’s say links from this channel, always pass tracking codes that use a unique query string parameter in the URL. So again, where it says, add new rule set, select type, I’m going to choose custom. Now next, where it says tracking code, I’m going to update that part of the condition, so that it reflects the channel that we’re setting up. So, let’s choose tracking code and then choose query string parameter from the list. Now, that’s going to present a text box where we can enter AC_EM, and then we can choose acquisition emails as the channel value at the bottom. And then we can set the channel’s value to tracking code under conversion variables. At this point, I’m going to click on save so I don’t lose my work. All right, now the final concept I want to review with you is the order of your processing roles. These roles will be processed in the order specified. In other words, processing stops once the first condition is met within your rule set. Now because of this behavior, you’ll want to move all of your organic channels to the bottom, except for natural search, since you probably have SEO efforts. Now, this is going to leave channels like direct, internal and referring domains, and it’s going to be as easy as dragging and dropping, in the order that you want them to appear. I’m going to do this first with internal. I’m going to drag and drop that to the bottom. Next, referring domains. I’ll drag that to the bottom, and then last direct, I’m going to click on save, so that we don’t lose our work. Okay, so I’ve walked you through the last step necessary for generating more marketing channels reports in Adobe Analytics. You should now feel comfortable diving in and setting up marketing channels, processing rules in your own Report Suite. . -