Getting to know the new Marketing Channels reports

I fig­ured it’s about time I started blog­ging again. I’ll bet some of you thought I had died. No, I did not. I’ve just been busy adjust­ing to life as a Prod­uct Man­ager and work­ing hard to help imple­ment as many of the fan­tas­tic ideas that I learned from you on Twit­ter and else­where over the past two years as possible.

In fact, this post is about one of those ideas, although it is one that I played very lit­tle part in bring­ing about. If you logged in to Site­Cat­a­lyst today, you may have noticed some­thing cool: a new set of reports called “Mar­ket­ing Channels.”

If you’ve ever won­dered how your e-mail mar­ket­ing as a whole stacks up against, say, your SEM cam­paigns in terms of rev­enue or any other con­ver­sion met­ric, this is the set of reports for you. If you’ve ever wanted to see both first-touch and last-touch acqui­si­tion side-by-side in the same report, this is the set of reports for you. And not only do these new reports look great, but they offer the abil­ity to dig into indi­vid­ual chan­nels and sub­re­late keywords/tracking codes/URLs/referring domains/etc. with other reports of your choosing.

Site­Cat­a­lyst has always offered ways for you to com­pare vis­i­tor acqui­si­tion chan­nels as groups; the most com­mon solu­tions to date have been the Uni­fied Sources VISTA rule and the Chan­nel Man­ager plug-in. These solu­tions con­tinue to deliver unique value, but we are excited about the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports for a num­ber of rea­sons, and we think you will like them, too. Why?

1. They do not con­sume any addi­tional cus­tom variables.
2. They are based on pro­cess­ing rules that you con­fig­ure in Site­Cat­a­lyst. Most of the time, no imple­men­ta­tion changes are required
3. Not only does that make setup easy, but it means that the whole thing is marketer-controlled. In short, you likely won’t need to involve IT.
4. The Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel reports are 100% free—they don’t even involve addi­tional data collection.

Now, if you clicked to try to view these reports in Site­Cat­a­lyst right away, you were prompted to set them up. Do not panic; what you saw is nor­mal. Although they are based on your exist­ing data col­lec­tion, these reports do not pop­u­late data auto­mat­i­cally, because you first need to cus­tomize them to your organization’s mar­ket­ing efforts and stan­dards. For­tu­nately, with your help we devel­oped a handy wiz­ard to walk you through setup. As you are famil­iar­iz­ing your­self with the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports, we strongly rec­om­mend using the wiz­ard. This is because things like order of rules does mat­ter here; once a traf­fic source matches a rule, the vis­i­tor is “claimed” by that rule. The wiz­ard helps ensure that rules are estab­lished in the cor­rect order and syn­tax to begin pop­u­lat­ing these reports immediately.

So how does it work? We cap­ture a lot of data from your site, and we can glean a lot about mar­ket­ing chan­nels from that data. For exam­ple, if face​book​.com is the refer­ring domain, it’s prob­a­bly a social media cam­paign. If that’s impor­tant to you, you can set it up directly in the tool—we already grab the refer­ring domain, so there is no addi­tional data col­lec­tion required. Sim­i­larly, if a URL has a query para­me­ter of “cid,” you might be able to tell us that it’s gotta be an affil­i­ate cam­paign. And if there is a page view where the refer­ring URL is iden­ti­fied as a search engine, but your paid search query para­me­ter isn’t present on the land­ing page, we can be sure that the user came through the Nat­ural Search channel.

This nifty graphic shows how these Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels rules process your incom­ing data:

Note that, as men­tioned above, once some­thing matches a rule, it doesn’t see the other rules “below,” so in most cases you will want to make sure that your most gen­eral rules (usu­ally “Direct”—the absence of any other acqui­si­tion chan­nel) is at the bot­tom. (NOTE: The absolute bot­tom is not shown above.)

It may take you a bit of effort to get these set up; you’ll need to con­sider how you want to define each chan­nel, and then work in Site­Cat­a­lyst to make it hap­pen. (Or you can get Omni­ture Con­sult­ing to help you.) But when you’re done with setup… ummmm, wow:

Kinda jumps off the page, doesn’t it? (That’s because we put a shadow behind it on this blog… I kid!) But it’s more than just a warm “ZOMG SHINY!!!11!!” It’s all of your mar­ket­ing chan­nels in one place, so it’s easy to see how con­ver­sion com­pares not just between indi­vid­ual cam­paigns, but between entire chan­nels: Nat­ural Search ver­sus Dis­play, Direct ver­sus Social Media, E-mail ver­sus Affil­i­ate, and so on and so forth. (Of course, you can also add your own chan­nels that the rest of the world hasn’t even thought of yet.)

As you can see in the screen shot above, each of these chan­nels can be bro­ken down by the val­ues that roll up into them. For affil­i­ate, this might be cam­paign track­ing codes that you tell the report to cap­ture in that chan­nel. For Nat­ural Search, this could be the search engine; it could also be the search key­word, or even the search engine and the search key­word con­cate­nated together. You get to define the “detail” that rolls up into each chan­nel. You also get to define the “engage­ment period,” or the amount of time that a visitor’s ini­tial acqui­si­tion chan­nel infor­ma­tion is retained prior to conversion.

There is a lot to cover with regard to the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports, and this is really a topic for a future post, but we fig­ured you would prob­a­bly want to see not just con­ver­sion data, but also ROI for dif­fer­ent chan­nels, so we built that into the tool for you. This release of Site­Cat­a­lyst comes with a brand new, super-flexible ver­sion of numeric clas­si­fi­ca­tions which allow you to apply cost data to each chan­nel. One of the best things about these new numeric clas­si­fi­ca­tions is the abil­ity to assign a cer­tain cost to a chan­nel for a spe­cific date range, then assign a dif­fer­ent cost to the same chan­nel for a dif­fer­ent time period. The cost of run­ning, say, SEM cam­paigns is cer­tain to change over time. With numeric clas­si­fi­ca­tions and Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports, you can reli­ably ana­lyze and com­pare ROI over time for all of your acqui­si­tion channels.

I haven’t really attempted to “re-document” the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports here, and I’m not going to do it right now because we believe our doc­u­men­ta­tion team hit a home run with this one. You can access the help doc­u­ments for Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports within the reports them­selves by click­ing the “View the doc­u­men­ta­tion” link at the bot­tom. If you have any spe­cific ques­tions after read­ing this post and the user man­ual, please leave a com­ment and we’ll address your ques­tions here and/or in the FAQ in the doc­u­men­ta­tion. (I know there are a num­ber of great ques­tions I’m not answer­ing here, and I’m sorry. I hope we can still be friends.)

A few tips before I leave you to geek out on your own Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports:

1. Query string para­me­ters should not con­tain equals signs (“=”). When you’re set­ting up a rule for, say, affil­i­ate cam­paigns, you might tell the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports, you may want to tell the tool, “Every URL on my site that con­tains the query string ‘sc_cid=’ is an affil­i­ate cam­paign.” That is great, but in this case, leave off the equals sign when you’re inputting the query para­me­ter. Input the query para­me­ter as “sc_cid” only.
2. Pro­cess­ing rules do not affect any data out­side of the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports. Every­thing is wholly con­tained within these reports, so areas such as the Traf­fic Sources, Cam­paigns, and Search­Cen­ter reports are entirely unaf­fected by changes you make in the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels pro­cess­ing rules. SAINT data based on these other reports is also untouched when you change a pro­cess­ing rule.
3. Do not delete the “Direct” or “Inter­nal” acqui­si­tion chan­nels. Direct hap­pens; peo­ple come directly to your site with­out click­ing any­thing. Inter­nal hap­pens; peo­ple sit on your site doing noth­ing for 30 min­utes and let their visit expire, then click to start a new visit. The refer­rer, in that case, is going to be a URL on your site. The rea­son we rec­om­mend not delet­ing these is that they are pre-defined chan­nels that do nat­u­rally occur; if these chan­nels are deleted, you will end up with “No chan­nel iden­ti­fied” in your reports instead when users meet the vacated criteria.
4. You may not need to rein­vent the wheel. In some cases, we’ve pre-configured cer­tain chan­nels with attrib­utes that we think most users will like. For exam­ple, the Social Media chan­nel makes its default deter­mi­na­tion based on a large list of refer­ring domains from known social net­work­ing sites. You may not need to change this. Don’t feel like you have to change some­thing just to make it yours. If it looks okay, go with it and update as necessary.
5. You may need to make imple­men­ta­tion changes to dif­fer­en­ti­ate one chan­nel from another. As I said above, in many or most cases, imple­men­ta­tion changes won’t be required to use the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports. But let’s say you want to use a query para­me­ter in the URL to define both the affil­i­ate and e-mail chan­nels. What if your e-mail links and affil­i­ate links both cur­rently pop­u­late the same query para­me­ter on the land­ing page? In some cases, Site­Cat­a­lyst might not be able to tell these chan­nels apart. So, in such cases you may want to start using one query para­me­ter for e-mail and another for affil­i­ate (for exam­ple, “e_cid” ver­sus “a_cid” or some­thing). You’ll want to make sure to update your Site­Cat­a­lyst code to make sure that both e_cid= and a_cid= val­ues get cap­tured in the appro­pri­ate vari­able just as they were before you split them out into sep­a­rate chan­nels in the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports. (Alter­na­tively, you could just have your e-mail ven­dor add a new query para­me­ter to your e-mail links and key off of that in your Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels setup. That’s just about the only poten­tial imple­men­ta­tion change we could foresee.
6. Use your Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels data across a whole bunch of tools. You thought this was Site­Cat­a­lyst only? Psh­hht. Try Site­Cat­a­lyst, Data Ware­house (for report­ing and seg­ment­ing), Dis­cover (report­ing and seg­ment­ing), Report­Builder, Excel Client, Report­ing API (minus the numeric clas­si­fi­ca­tions, at present), and Data Sources.
7. Sub­re­late chan­nel details with just about any­thing. You will need an Omni­ture rep­re­sen­ta­tive to set this up for you, but you can sub­re­late your mar­ket­ing chan­nel details with any cus­tom or stan­dard con­ver­sion report—eVars, Time Spent on Visit, Mobile reports, Test&Target, etc. This type of sub­re­la­tion is done individually—report to report—so you’ll pick the reports that will be most valu­able to you when bro­ken down by mar­ket­ing chan­nel details (and vice versa). In most cases, these sub­re­la­tions will be absolutely free. Con­tact your Account Man­ager for details.
8. Clas­sify track­ing codes, key­words, etc. The clas­si­fi­ca­tion tool in the Admin Con­sole allows you to clas­sify key­words, track­ing codes (prob­a­bly the same clas­si­fi­ca­tion file you’re using for cam­paigns today), and more. This means you can clas­sify nat­ural search terms by brand, etc. to fur­ther orga­nize your Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels data.
9. Unique value lim­its do apply. The Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports are lim­ited to a total of 500,000 unique “details” val­ues per month, across all chan­nels. You’ll want to keep this in mind as you deter­mine the details to record in each chan­nel. For exam­ple, for the Nat­ural Search chan­nel, you might choose to have the key­word as the detail. You are cer­tainly going to have more key­words than search engines; in fact, you might have more than 500,000 key­words alone per month (let alone details val­ues in other chan­nels). And choos­ing to con­cate­nate the search engine and key­word in the details would yield even more unique values.

I think I have rat­tled on longer than I intended to, but I hope you can see how excited we are about the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports and what they can mean for your vis­i­tor acqui­si­tion analy­sis and opti­miza­tion. So please go nuts and have a blast bring­ing your site more qual­ity vis­i­tors who are likely to convert.

As always, if you have any ques­tions about any­thing posted here about Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels reports or any­thing else related to the Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite, please leave a com­ment here or con­tact me on Twit­ter and I’ll do my best to get you the infor­ma­tion that you need.