Marketing Channels, Please Use Responsibly

Hey everybody, welcome to Marketing Channels, Please Use Responsibly. I’m Sarah Owen and I’m here with my colleague Gretchen Muir. And Gretchen and I have been knee deep in data at a few different companies. Yes we have, and one of the great things about the two of us is that I love reporting on data and Sarah loves collecting the data. We are the perfect yin and yang. Currently Sarah and I are partners at H&R blog. Today Gretchen and I are teaming up to talk about how to use marketing channels and attribution models to understand your brand’s engagement and hopefully conversion with your customers. I’ll walk through the setup and maintenance of marketing channels and then Gretchen will go through the reporting aspect, specifically looking at marketing channel reports and how they differ from campaigns. Alright, let’s dive right in. If marketing channels have not been set up on your report suite yet, you’ll be greeted with this auto setup screen. This auto setup screen has some of the most common marketing channels, so you can just go ahead and use it and any modifications you want to make, we can make them later after you hit the save button. Once the marketing channels are set up, this is a screen that you’ll see from here on out. From this screen you can rename or make new marketing channels. The marketing channel names here are pretty universal, but you can change them to match your company’s vernacular. For example, you might call it organic search instead of natural search, or maybe you call it banner instead of display. And while these channels cover quite a few marketing efforts, you will want to add some new ones. To add a new one, just click the add channel link and a new row will appear. Examples of channels that you will want to add could be like video or vanity URL, or you may want to break apart an existing one. Instead of just email, you may want to have marketing generated emails or product generated emails. And you’ll definitely want to add the other campaign. This other campaign channel will pick up marketing tactics that come in, but don’t qualify for one of these other rules. We’ll go more into that on an upcoming slide. A few more things to check out here. First, the channel ID column. While this just looks like a typical numerical column, it actually is pretty important. The number you see here is what will be in your clickstream data. So you’ll see the number one in your clickstream data, but you won’t see the channel name of page search. So it is important to know your channel ID number. Next, let’s take a look at the enabled column. If a channel is no longer needed, you can just uncheck the box to disable it. There is no deleting a channel. You can either enable it or disable it with this box. Now you can have up to 25 marketing channels, so you have some wiggle room before you have to vote a channel off the island. Once you do hit the 25 channel limit and decide to reuse a channel for a different tactic, it is crucial to know that while the name changes retroactive, the data affiliated to the channel is not. So while you may have changed the name from affiliate to video, the data previously captured, the affiliate data, does not go away. The data being captured will change once you change the rule affiliated to this channel. So just remember the name is retroactive, but the data is not. And lastly, let’s look at the override last touch channel. The reason to check this is to allow specific tactics to maintain credit as the last channel a person used to get to your website. Channels that are not intentional, like direct, internal, or refer, usually have this checkbox unchecked. As we’ll see in the next slide, these three tactics can be considered like sponge channels, meaning that they soak up any traffic that doesn’t match one of your previous rules. While we don’t want these sponge channels to take credit as the last touch channel, they are still meaningful because we do want all the traffic coming to the website to be bucketed into a marketing channel rule. Once you have named your channel, the next step is to define what each channel represents. For marketing channel rules, as soon as your traffic matches a rule, then that is what it will be classified as. Now this is different than processing rules. With processing rules, every rule is evaluated and can act on your data. So given this one and done approach, the order of your marketing channel rules is very important. Adobe’s recommendation is to start your rules off with paid search and natural search. For paid search, you will typically use the matches paid search detection rules, meaning that traffic is coming from a known search engine and it has your campaign ID in the URL. You can tighten this rule up even further by stating that the campaign ID has to start with a specific value. In most cases, paid search will start with PS underscore. If traffic matches this rule, then the channel name will be set to paid search and you will want to set the channel detail value to the campaign ID value. Both the channel name and the channel detail will come into play when Gretchen talks about reporting. And for natural search, you’ll use the matches natural search detection rule. This rule will also look for traffic coming from a known search engine, but does not contain your campaign ID. You’ll want to set the channel detail to the search engine that is sending you the traffic. Next, you’ll want to account for traffic that has specific campaign IDs in your URL, such as email, display, or affiliate. You identify traffic for each of these channels by the campaign ID. For example, email is identified by the campaign ID starting with EM underscore. You will want to place your other campaign channel at the end of this section to capture any marketing effort that brings traffic to the site, but didn’t get captured in one of the above rules. Think of this as a catch all bucket for marketing efforts. And this is a channel to keep an eye on. If there’s a marketing effort that ends up accounting for a large portion of traffic, you may want to have a conversation with your marketing team to see if this tactic should be pulled up out of the other bucket and given its own rule. For all campaign ID driven traffic, you will want to use the campaign ID value as your channel detail. All right, let’s move on to the next channel, which is social networks. This is traffic from social networks that does not have a campaign ID in the URL. While Adobe provides a few social networks by default, you will want to supplement this list. Adobe has a more robust list that you can copy and paste into here. And you can find this list by googling Adobe analytics list of social networks. The article that pops up and the results will have like 157 domains that you can put in here. For social networks, you will want to use the referring domain as a channel detail so you know what channel is sending you the traffic. As we touched on in the previous slide, the last few channels here of internal, direct and referring domains are those sponge channels as they soak up any traffic that didn’t match any of the above channels. If you are seeing none in your marketing channel reports, then you should reevaluate these sponge channels to see if their rules need to be modified or maybe a new channel needs to be made in order to account for all the traffic. The channel detail to select for internal and direct is the first page of the visit. And for referring domains, you guessed it, you want to use referring domains as the channel detail. The last item for us to look at is the expiration. By default, the expiration for marketing channels is a rolling 30 days. This means that every time a visitor comes back to your site, this 30 days starts over again. Now, this is important to note because it is different than how an EVAR works. An EVAR is not rolling. For an EVAR, take your campaign EVAR, if you set it to a 30 day expiry, as soon as 30 days are up, no matter how often the person came back to your site, then that EVAR value will expire. So that’s definitely different than this rolling marketing channel expiration. And while it seems pretty simple, it really is important to know when it comes to reporting. And Gretchen’s going to go into how impactful this rolling versus set 30 days is later on. All right, now that we have the marketing channels set up and collecting data, it’s time to turn it over to Gretchen to see how all this great data gets put into action. Thanks, Sarah. Now let’s start using some of that great data. It’s important to have consensus from your marketing partners in your marketing channel set up so they fully understand the difference between marketing channels and campaign reports. Marketing channels will only work if there is consistent tagging from your marketing partners. And consistent tagging will make marketing channels and campaign reporting so much easier. Verify your original setup and any changes that you want to make the very next day to avoid any unintended consequences. Marketing channels are processed data, so it does take a little longer for that data to be available. You won’t be able to use real time reports or any of the near real time data you see in your report suites. It’s easy to mess up your marketing channels in setup, so tweaks validation is important. And sometimes you may only need to change the order. It’s always better when you as an analyst find the issue instead of the marketing partner. This builds confidence in Adobe as a data source and yourself as an analyst. Marketing partners are often questioning Adobe data since it doesn’t match their tactic platform data like email or search. Marketing channels are not the same as campaigns. Marketing channels are inclusive of owned, organic, and earned tactics. They show the interplay of all tactics. Campaigns only show the owned tactics. It can be a huge contributor of both traffic and conversions. Earn can also drive traffic when posts go viral. SEO and social partners will be great champions of marketing channels since their contribution will show up there and not in campaign reporting. Executives also like marketing channel reports because they are a concise view of all tactics without multiple tactics claiming the same credit. Campaign reports still very much have their place, so you don’t have to ask your marketing partners to change what they are doing. Campaign reports are perfect for specific tactic and campaign reporting and can take advantage of classifications that you hopefully already have in place. Remember, classifications can be used for a lot more than just campaigns. They can even be used for marketing channels. Just be ready to answer questions when people say, my tactic report shows $100,000 in revenue and this marketing channel report shows $90,000. Show how that $10,000 difference has gone into organic or earned tactics instead of the owned or intentional tactic. Marketing channels and campaigns should always trend in the same direction, but they will never match. When sharing numbers, just be clear of the source of the data, campaigns or marketing channels. Use the right breakdowns when looking at marketing channels. Use marketing channel detail instead of campaigns and the values in the marketing channel detail are determined in the setup process that Sarah covered. This is one place of difference in the expiration methods that Sarah mentioned come into play. For example, someone came through on a display ad four months ago and has visited the site via direct once a month since then. Marketing channels will have all of that traffic still attributed to display while the only traffic within the campaign expiration timeframe, for example, 30 days would be attributed to display in campaign reports. That’s one of the reasons you don’t break down marketing channels by campaign. You will see unspecified. The traffic from the example I gave would be here, or you see own tactics being attributed to natural search since the organic and earned tactics don’t overwrite the campaign ID. Tactic owners don’t necessarily like sharing credit, but it takes all types of tactics to maximize traffic and conversion. Adobe has a very slick panel that can make quick work of beginning to analyze which attribution method is best for you. Always pick a metric, a dimension, and multiple models and then click build. And voila. Depending on your strategy, you may or may not see big swings in the different attribution models. In the chart, you can see that some tactics are impacted more than others by the model you pick. Choose a standard attribution model that works best for your company and use that consistently. You don’t have to stick to one model. Just make sure you are consistent how you are applying the different models and don’t cherry pick models for specific campaigns or tactics. Create calculated metrics for frequently used KPIs with your selected attribution and ensure that people use these tactics. Have consistent labeling when using non-standard or multiple attribution models so people understand what the data is. Use the description field in reports to explain the metrics and use the edit label functionality in charts to explicitly describe the metrics and attribution models. As Eric Matosoff would say, when in doubt, right click. If everyone is doing their own attribution model or people are unclear what they are looking at, they can quickly lose confidence in Adobe data when people are seeing consistent numbers everywhere. Review the attribution models on a regular basis to ensure your model is still the best fit for your company. There will be times when comparing models will be more interesting than others. Anytime you have a strategy shift, big dollar shifts, take a look at the different models to make sure you are still telling the story that needs to be told. After this year, we know that anything can happen, so even big changes and outside factors can impact attribution too. Don’t forget seasonality. One way to use multiple methods is to examine your highest cost acquisition channel by using last touch and break that down by first touch to see if you would still get a substantial part of that traffic or conversions through lower cost channels. These newer attribution models can also relieve you of the tedious campaign stacking analysis which is very time consuming and can be painfully manual depending on your method. Anyone who has used Adobe as long as I have has done this in the past. Take days to analyze and put together a story that execs thought about for about 30 minutes and then did absolutely nothing. Use the newer models which can credit the middle touches like U-shaped, J-curve, Inverse J and Custom. Also, there are some interesting calculated metrics that can be created like acquisition rate and close rate by combining the different attribution models. Trevor Paulson has a great video on this on the Adobe Workspace YouTube channel. Just remember, responsible implementers and analysts, auto set up and refine your marketing channels, review marketing channels and selected attribution models on a regular basis. If there’s a place for marketing channels and campaigns, just apply them consistently. We hope that these tips that we’ve shared with you will help you be responsible and get great insights from your marketing channels reports. Now you can hit us up with some great questions in the Q&A session. Thanks for joining us. Wow, that was a great session. Thank you so much, Gretchen and Sarah. So we know that you have a lot of questions and I’d like to bring them up to the digital stage right now to answer them live. Now they are coming to us all the way from Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas. So please give a big welcome to Sarah and Gretchen. I hope you all like my Dr. Fauci bobblehead dance. I just want to say, you know, Sarah and Gretchen, that’s a very joyous song and all, but it reminds me of a tragedy that struck in February of 2020, already a bad year. No, I’m not talking about coronavirus. I’m talking about Super Bowl 54. I’m a San Francisco 49ers fan, just so all of you know. And for those of you out there, you know, in Asia Pacific region, American football is like rugby, but without the haka. All right. So the Kansas City Chiefs defeated my San Francisco 49ers and broke my heart. But anyway, just wanted to leave you with that tragic outcome. So I’m going to let both of you take it away from here. Thank you. Yeah. Well, sorry it was a tragic day for you. I think we all got it as a holiday and went to the parade. So there was an awesome time through the downtown area. No, no, no. Too fun. But yeah, Gretchen and I are super happy to be here. So happy. And we’re ready to jump into some questions. Yeah, because I was keeping an eye on it. And there was one that has your name written all over it. Gretchen, let me read it here for you. It says, hey, what ways have you found work best to understand the number of marketing channels visitors are engaging with? Hey, great question. You can build segments using the account distinct criteria with the marketing channel dimension and create buckets of the numbers of touches and break down those KPIs using those segments to show the overlap of marketing channels. Jen Lasser talks about this in one of her 2020 sessions titled The Future Belongs to the Curious Our Best Adobe Analytics Tips and Tricks with Jen and Ben. So you can build out your custom histograms using those segments. So it’s a really nice way to see how many marketing touch points the customers engage with. And Jen does a really good job of walking you through the steps to create that marketing channel histogram. So just Google Adobe Summit 2020 our best tips and you can find all the answers. Yeah, I love it because you and I were looking at the histogram the other week and you totally you totally made me laugh when you when I was talking about like the old school way of looking at marketing channels where the dimension is your last touch and across the metrics as your filter is your first touch dimensions. And so that’s how I was have been used to seeing marketing channels. But yeah, you’ve set me straight saying the new way are these custom histograms. But on a more serious note, your answer about you know, looking at your marketing channels brings up a fact that it’s really important to make sure that the marketing channels are you know, pulling in the data and bucketing it in the appropriate channels. And so something that you and I do Gretchen like every single before every single tax season because we do work at H&R Block. So our lives are based on tax seasons as we get together and we review all of our marketing channel rules. And so we’ll look at all of them. But we really do take some time looking at that other channel bucket or other campaign bucket that we talked about in our presentation. So we look at that to see if there’s anything that’s really has been driving a lot of traffic and maybe we should lift it out into its own channel. And then we also reach out to our marketing teams to see like if they’re doing anything new this year or where we should make a new channel to specifically capture that traffic. And while we’re doing all that fun reviewing, we do document anything that we change. So what we do is Gretchen and I will take a screenshot of all of our marketing channel rules with them all collapsed because you want to see the order because that’s what we talked about is order is really important because as soon as your one of your rules hits that’s what it’s going to be classified as. So that’s why order is important here. So we take a picture of all of them and then we expand each of the individual rules and take a screenshot because you want to be able to see all the logic that’s being applied to figure out that rule. And then we take all of our screenshots. Now this is going to sound a little lame because I’m going to say Excel. So we open up Excel and we put all of our screenshots in there. And on the tab we put the date of when we made that change. That way we always remember, okay, what did we change and what did it look like? And so, yeah, documentation. It’s really important. It sure is. And since we’re on the topic of documentation, another good thing to document is when to use marketing channels and when to use tactics and which attribution models. And we’ve got a question of someone saying that they’re not seeing a big difference in the attribution models. And that is something that I’ve seen as well too. Being at first versus last or any of your custom, your J or U models doesn’t always make a big difference or as big a difference as you thought. Usually just kind of display and search will swap out a little bit, but keep playing around with them. And it’s okay if it doesn’t make a big difference and you do not need to buy your media through Adobe to see a difference for that. That’s not going to have any impact on that. Contribution data is not going to change your marketing channel information. So that is not going to help you. That’s not going to change how your attribution models look. So it’s just going to be more based on your primary tactics and how you’re messaging and kind of where in the funnel you talk to people. If you have specific tactics that are upper funnel and other tactics that are more conversion based that could impact, change more of your funnels. But going back to when to use channels versus tactics, I think tactics and channels are great. They need to be used individually. So tactic owners can use tactic reports like email and paid search, but reports showing total traffic, she used marketing channels. Just make sure that tactic owners know which numbers are being used where. So if they see a number in presentation that might not match their tactic report, they don’t panic because both numbers are right. Your marketing channels and your tactic numbers. And one is not better than the other. They’re just really good at different things. It’s kind of like Sarah and I, we’re both awesome, but she is way better at data collection and my dashboards look way better than hers. Oh my gosh. You cracked me up, babe. And so an attribution models are one things I’ll keep close to the analytics team. Don’t let the business owners go wild with attribution models. They can have a little fun, but there should be kind of a set of standard. You work with your marketing channel owners to set that standard and first and last are great models. And you don’t need to use one of the fancy new ones to be, but experiment with them just in case you do find something that is interesting. And Trevor Paulson has a great video with attribution IQ and calculated metrics on the Adobe YouTube analytics channel. And there’s some really cool calculated metrics you can do using the different attribution models. And there’s also a session from this past summit. Action blinders are keeping you from modern marketing insights with Nate Smith. So check that at the Adobe 2020 summit sessions too. Good ones. Okay, Sarah. Here is a data collection question. Wait, no data collection.

You talked about using marketing channel detail as a breakdown, and I get that the stakeholders who insist on using other dimensions for breakdown and then question the data they see. How have you been able to prove that the marketing channel data is accurately being reported? Oh my goodness. Yeah, those stakeholders, they find a dimension and they just love it and they stick with it and they want to break down everything by it, even though we tell them not to. But yeah, trying to show your stakeholder that the marketing channel detail data is accurate, even though when they break it down by their other dimension, it looks a little wonky. It’s really, really difficult to do that in the Adobe Analytics UI. So where you need to go is in the clickstream data. So the clickstream data is that data that gets dumped into your data lake, usually hourly or daily. And now clickstream data, it can kind of get you out of your comfort zone and it’s probably definitely out of the comfort zone of your stakeholder. But they’re talking about Summit 2020. There was another really fantastic session there that I loved where they walked through how to look in your clickstream data, the specific values to look at and did a lot of great visualizations of how to show with your stakeholder why they see kind of the funky data they see when they’re using their favorite dimension to break down and then versus what they’re seeing when they use your marketing channel detail to break down. And so the name of the session is Behind Every Good Report, There’s Good Data. And it is just amazing. They walk through so many examples. I feel like they read my email because like every single example I think that a stakeholder sent me, I’m like, oh, I’ve had that question sent to me before. So it’s super duper helpful. And the session is like 20 minutes long. So you can watch it over lunch and then just go impress everybody in your afternoon meetings. Yeah. Thanks for asking that. That was a fun one. I see a question here in the questions. I see none in my marketing channel report. And when I break it down further using marketing channel detail, it still says none. How do I course correct for this? And I think that’s something that Sarah talked about earlier in the presentation. You check your marketing channels. What is your marketing channel detail set to in the rules? So you should at least have something like referring domain or entry page or anything to maybe help you get a clue URL that potentially would have a tracking code in it that maybe you could track it down to. And then instead of having a none, just have like an unknown or some kind of catchall. So everything goes into some bucket with those sponge channels that Sarah talked about. You should never have a none. It should just be unknown or something else that you can maybe do a little research in. But you got it. Yeah, it’s definitely probably down in those like you talked about those sponge channels. And now I’m going to do a blast from the past. So you heard that I’ve been working on Adobe analytics since it was called Omniture. So I do know I’ve been around for a little bit. And my favorite blogs about marketing channels, I think there’s a series of four that Brent Dykes, he used to work at Adobe. I think he’s now at Domo. I know where’s he at? No, no. Yeah. But he wrote four blogs all about marketing channels. And one of them was specifically and you’ll be like, oh, I know where Sarah got all her info is I love his blog. So if you Google Brent Dykes and marketing channel set up or marketing channel rules, you probably should find them. And they’re just fantastic. And so I think he gives a lot of step by step. And so I would go check that out because yeah, like Rich was saying, you shouldn’t have a none. I think we just need to work on those sponge channels a little bit at the very bottom. So your traffic all falls into them. You got it. Woo. Very cool. Awesome. Awesome. But let’s see what else we got going on. One thing I want to hit on is super important is the importance of consistent campaign IDs. Your marketing channel rules are only going to be as good as your tracking codes and how consistent they are. So you know, and just make sure no matter how hard you try building those awesome campaign IDs, if you have poor URL structure and they’re not going to get picked up, you know, all that work has gone to naught. So make sure you work with partners and anybody who calls themselves a digital marketer should know how to construct a URL. The difference between an ampersand and a question mark, watch out for those anchor tags because that’ll really mess you up. So teach your marketers how to use the debugger. I know Joe talked about that a lot, but it’s super important. So they can see that tracking code being passed in the campaign ID, EVAR zero or whatever EVAR or prop you’re using and not just in the URL once you get to the page. That doesn’t mean Adobe is reading it at all. Double check that for sure. I know. Who knew? Those little characters, ampersands and question marks can cause such havoc on your data. Oh my goodness. There is one thing I was thinking about back about the presentation that I do want to make sure everybody’s aware of. And when we built our paid search rule, we use matches paid search detection. And so matches paid search detection does take a little legwork. So what you need to be able to do is go into Adobe and you’ll want to click on admin and then click on report suite and then pick the report suite that you have your marketing channels set up on and then go up to kind of the middle where it says edit settings and then choose general. And then you’ll see paid search detection. You want to go in there and this is where you will put your URL parameters. So it’s the URL parameter that you use on all your marketing campaigns. So values I’ve seen are like CID or the word campaign ID actually all written out. That’s what we use at H&R Black. And so you want to add it there because what that will do is it’ll tell Adobe that when there’s a search coming in from a known search engine and it has that URL parameter that it’s paid search. And then it will also do the same for your natural search. Like if you have something coming in from a known search engine but no URL parameter, then it will classify it as natural search. But I do see that our time, Gretchen, is running down. So I don’t know if we can both get back up here. I know that we’ve been to a couple of these experience exchanges and just have really, really loved it because there’s nothing better than talking analytics with people. And Adobe this year has kicked off Adobe User Groups where you can talk analytics all you want and expand your analytics network. So Sarah and I co-lead a group with our friend Luke and we’ve had a few virtual events this year and have such a fun time meeting new analytics friends. Sarah and I can talk analytics all day, but it’s more fun with more people. So Gretchen and I really encourage you guys to reach out to your Adobe rep about leading or joining Adobe Analytics User Groups. I know they’re taking them out worldwide. There’s a YouTube channel for Adobe Analytics Users Group that has recordings of our past sessions. We’ve just had three so far. We just started at the beginning of the year. So we’re excited to be part of this Adobe Analytics User Group family and hope you can join us or for a more convenient time zone, there are user groups all over. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, you guys. Enjoy the rest of the sessions.