Online Custom Channel Setup

March 4, 2024

To have accurate reporting, marketing channels must be set up to reflect your organization’s UTM strategy. This guide takes you through the best way to configure your custom channel rules.

Before You Begin

Before you begin creating your channel rules for Marketo Measure, take some time to think about the organization of your marketing campaigns and how they fit into the Marketo Measure framework. Determine which channels, subchannels, campaigns, and referring websites you want to track.

Things to keep in mind:

  • Your organization can create a maximum of 40 custom marketing channels. This includes both offline and online channels.
  • Your organization can create up to 200 subchannels.
  • Each collection, or bucket, of data needs its own rule (row in the spreadsheet) to specify how the data will be organized. Be as specific as possible.
  • Marketo Measure logic prioritizes data in descending order starting with the top row of the spreadsheet and making its way down. It reads each bucket, or cell, in row by row looking for the first fit. The data is then sorted according to the values in these buckets. More on this below.
  • Do not sort your sheet in alphabetical order as this interferes with the logic rules.
  • Once the file is uploaded, you cannot change any of the rules for seven days. Marketo Measure utilizes this time to process and update the Touchpoints.

Marketo Measure Logic and Priorities

The first step is to download the custom channel spreadsheet from the Marketo Measure app. Navigate to Settings under the My Account tab and select Online. You can select either Download Original Template or Download Current Rules.

The spreadsheet has seven columns:

  • Channel: add your various marketing channels here
  • Subchannel: add the corresponding subchannels here
  • Campaign: add campaign names here, whether the value is coming from UTMs or Salesforce Campaigns for the Marketo Measure Activities functionality
  • Medium: the medium column represents the value of the utm_medium parameter
  • Source: the source column represents the value of the utm_source parameter
  • Landing Page: add landing page here
  • Referring Website: the URLs of websites that refer traffic to your pages or built-in Marketo Measure logic (indicated by brackets)

The eighth column notes which rules you cannot delete from the spreadsheet with “Do Not Remove.” The top of the spreadsheet has default channel rules that Marketo Measure recommends you do not change or remove even if you do not use these channels. Marketo Measure has deep integrations with these platforms so they are included by default.

The rows represent rules and the order in which Marketo Measure prioritizes the data. The first row has priority over the second row, the second row has priority over the third row, and so on. When determining what Marketing Channel & Subchannel to bucket touchpoints into, Marketo Measure reads top-down, left to right, until it finds a row that meets the criteria of the touchpoint. (If a touchpoint has a utm_source=Facebook, the touchpoint is bucketed into the Social.Facebook channel due to rule 15 in the screenshot).

Marketo Measure comes with 12 default channels for your use. These channels correlate to platforms with which Marketo Measure is fully integrated. Whether you use them or not, do not remove them. If you do use one of these platforms, Bing Ads for example, but prefer to use a different naming convention for the channel or subchannel, you are able to update the name. An example is shown in the image below.

The structure of the rules is also important. The rules may look like repeated information and missing data but this structure is intentional. For accurate data sorting, it’s necessary to map each individual source to the appropriate channel separately–even sources sharing subchannels and channels. The more detailed and granular the rules are, the more insightful the results are. Basically, it is best practice to write a detailed rule for every marketing effort you want to track.

Consider the following situation: you have other ads that you do not want to track for some reason, or you receive visits to your website from a familiar channel, but not a familiar source. This situation could lead to data loss if Marketo Measure cannot find the appropriate rule to use to sort the data. To prevent this from happening, Marketo Measure advises you to break your rule over several rows.

Each parameter or component of the rule is separately mapped to the channel. For instance, when Marketo Measure has Facebook data to sort, it looks for rules related to Facebook. It scans from top to bottom. In the example pictured below, Marketo Measure would understand that for the first Facebook subchannel, all it has to read is the source parameter to drop data into that rule’s bucket.

The next rule only asks for the medium parameter, so any data with that parameter is bucketed into this channel. Lastly for Facebook, any data coming from the Facebook URL is placed in the last Facebook bucket.

The default channel ‘Other’ exists to catch data that does not meet any rule’s criteria. Notice that some of the buckets in the Other channel contain asterisks (*). These asterisks represent wildcards that act as a catch-all.

Due to Marketo Measure logic working from top to bottom, the wildcard rule, indicated with an asterisk (*), should be placed at the very end of your rule sheet. All data that is not caught or sorted by the other rules is added to this wildcard bucket.

Below are more examples of wildcard logic:

  • *email* = contains “email”
  • *email = ends with “email”
  • email* = starts with email

In addition, note that if you create a subchannel for one of your channels, you must create a subchannel for all rules under that channel. In other words, if you create one subchannel, you cannot leave the rest of the columns blank.