Set up marketing channels in your report suite

In this video, I’ll be demonstrating how to set up Marketing Channel Reports in the Adobe Analytics Admin console. 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 or out of the box first and last touch metrics as well as other standard conversion metrics.

The Marketing Channels user interface gives you the flexibility to modify your channels and roles whenever needed. Even though this feature reduces your reliance on technical implementation, we recommend you review your Marketing Channels set up at least twice a year to make sure they continue to reflect your organization’s business requirements.

There are three main steps to produce this reporting. We’ll cover the first two in this video. The third step is covered in a different video. Let’s start with the first step, which is defining the channels you want to include in Marketing Channels reports. This is going to be based on business requirements. This means you’ll need to work with other individuals in your organization to understand these requirements. Here are just some examples of questions you’ll want to answer.

Some of these are drilling down to understand the highest level of reporting you want to see in the Marketing Channel level. Marketing Channels like email or social media may require multiple channel definitions or maybe they won’t. The second step is going into the user interface to name all of your channels and to configure the override settings.

Let’s get started in the user interface. In analytics, we’re going to click on Admin and then Report Suite.

On the Report Suite Manager page, select a Report Suite. You can also select multiple report suites if all of your sites use the same marketing channel definitions, or you can use a template report suite if that makes sense for your situation. Okay, now I’m going to select My Report Suite then Edit Settings, Marketing Channels and Marketing Channel Manager. If Marketing Channels have not been previously configured, the automatic setup displays. This provides common marketing channels that you can choose to keep or disregard. We’re going to partially use auto setup. First, I’m deselecting email and affiliate. I plan to bucket email differently than how it’s reflected here. The Display channel requires another piece of information and that’s the query string parameter passed in the URLs to your site from Display Add clicks. For demonstration purposes, we’ll say that Display Adds always use the query string, DSP underscore ID to pass Display Add tracking codes.

I’m going to enter dsp underscore id in the text box right next to Display. And then I’m going to select the save button at the bottom which might look slightly truncated.

After we save the Auto Setup, we’ll see the Marketing Channel Manager settings page. Auto Setup will not display again since we’ve used it to define at least a single marketing channel. We’re going to add some marketing channels now and this is done by clicking the green ad channel link and then providing a name for that marketing channel. All right, first, I’m going to set up promotional emails.

I’m going to click on Add Channel again and I’m going to set up acquisition emails. If you recall earlier, I’d mentioned that I wanted to categorize the email channel more granularly than simply email. And so that’s what I’m doing at this point. Now that we’ve defined all of our channels, let’s to review some of the other settings available on the screen. But first I’m going to click on the Save button so that I don’t lose any of my work.

All right, enabled. This setting is simply going to allow you to enable or disable a marketing channel. Since you can’t delete a marketing channel, once it’s created, you can come back here and disable it, if it no longer applies to your marketing efforts. The Override Last Touch Channel is going to let you choose whether or not you want to override an existing persistent last touch channel with the selected channel. We recommend leaving this unchecked for both direct and internal channels. This is because they shouldn’t receive conversion credit for previously set pay channels or natural search. The channel breakdown is going to let you set the breakdown value by the channel value. This is usually the tracking code or the most granular value captured about an online marketing clip. Now for type there’s to two choices, online or offline. Offline would only apply if you uploaded offline data sources in your analytics report suite and have included it as a marketing channel and then color is going to be reflected in the reporting for that channel.

Last, you’re going to notice these warning images to the right of promotional emails and acquisition emails. This just indicates that processing roles haven’t been set up for these marketing channels yet. The reason we don’t see this for the other channels is because Auto Setup creates baseline processing roles, for Marketing Channels defined at that location. We set up both email Marketing Channels in this user interface which means we’ll need to manually set up the processing roles in a different interface. That topic is going to be covered in a different video.

Okay, so I’ve walked you through the first two steps necessary for generating Marketing Channels reports in Adobe Analytics. You should now feel comfortable diving in and setting up marketing channels in your report suite. . -