I’ve been a user of Adobe Analytics for the last decade and I don’t recall ever running into this issue previously. Recently I took over an implementation that spans a number of domains. The organization had moved from the ApiMeasurement implementation to Web SDK, and I took over soon after the they went live.
We didn’t have any issues with Last Touch Channel until we turned on the auto population of web data in the Web SDK extension. In the image below, someone had turned this on and included it in a release.
After going live, we saw a surge in single visits with two or more Last Touch Channels, and the increases were mostly in the organic variations of our channels…things like Paid Search to Natural Search, and Paid Social to Organic Social.
Once we reviewed the release and saw the inclusion of the web data, we knew it had to be related. Then we began reviewing the processing rules and saw they all were based on the referrer and a Campaign ID (cid) query parameter being present.
At this point we knew there had to be some issue with the processing, and so we checked the raw logs because workspace is limited with cardinality and available data (we don’t have evars and props for all hidden data). This is where we noticed that post_page_url didn’t exist in the raw logs for custom links, even when the page_url column was populated.
The important tid bit for us was:
“Marketing Channels based on page URL, included query strings, will NOT count a Marketing Channel instance on customer links.
This is because the referrer is available on custom links for Marketing Channel rules, but the page_url is not.”
Page URL isn’t used in logic for custom links!? It’s funny that you take for granted logic you set up in years past for Marketing Processing Rules, where we didn’t rely solely on the URL but had fallbacks for checking variables.
The trick is that Marketing Processing Rules are evaluated on a hit basis, and in the overall data funnel for Adobe Analytics, sessionization only occurs AFTER marketing channels are evaluated. So there is no concern for some attribute in an evar would persist from earlier in the session in the data, processing rules only use the data sent in the hit.
Moral of the story is always configure your marketing processing rules to use both a query parameter and a corresponding analytics variable.
You need to be capturing that query param in an evar or prop as a fallback, or else any custom links on the landing page from a paid referrer will end up overwriting the true last touch marketing channel because the query parameter isn’t available for processing.
For information on processing order: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/technotes/processing-order.html?lang=en
