Recently Omniture released a new feature called marketing channels.  If you haven't heard of this report yet, it's basically Omniture's answer to Google Analytic's Traffic Sources report.  The Marketing Channels report gives Site Catalyst users an easy way to segment visitors based on what source of channel (i.e. Paid Search vs. Display) drove them to the site.  While Omniture has previously had similar functionality via the Channel Manager plug-in, the implementation of it requires programming skills and is much more difficult than Google's tool.

 

With this new tool you will be able to do a quick, side by side comparison of all of your marketing channels.  In addition, once you finish the set up, you will be able to compare how individual campaigns...

are doing as well.  The biggest advantage with the marketing channels report over the channel manager plug-in is that no changes need to be made on the site.  All you need to do is follow the simple guide I've developed below.

 

 

First, open up the Site Catalyst admin console and select report suites.  Next, select the report suite that you want to set up with marketing channels.  Pick the edit settings drop down, go to marketing channels, and choose marketing channels manager.  If this is your first time trying to configure marketing channels, you'll be greeted with the Auto Setup guide (see screenshot below for an example):

 

 

Omniture does a decent job identifying some common channels you may want to track, however, the default rules they use to identify each channel may not be to your liking.  My recommendation is to use their automatic setup, and double check the rules in the next step.  One important thing to note, many companies use the same query string parameter to denote all campaigns.  For example, you may have 'CID=EMAIL…' and 'CID=DISPLAY…' instead of 'EMAIL=…' and 'DISPLAY=…'.  If that's the case, the default setup will not work correctly.

 

Once you complete the auto setup you'll get to the actual marketing channel manager screen which should look similar to this:

 

 

 

The Marketing Channel Manager screen is where you will add any new channels you may need, and disable any channels that you no longer need.  For instance, we had a few referring domains that we felt were large enough to stand on their own and give them their own channels on this screen.

 

Once you decide which channels you want to report, it's time to move onto step 2, defining the rules that identify each channel:

 

 

Here we can see which channels have rules identifying them, how many rules they have, and in what order the rules are processed.  By clicking on the green down arrow, we can see exactly what the rule is:

 

 

Each channel has a rule (or multiple rules) that define what types of traffic fit into that particular channel.  In addition, each channel also has a channel detail, which can be defined.  In this example, we can see that our email channel is defined by having the query string parameter "cid" and all traffic that matches this rule will be labeled as email.  The last thing to note in this picture is the bottom line where you set the channel's value.  This is what will appear when you break down an individual channel.  For Paid search, this could be a combination of search engine and keyword.  For referrers and affiliates, it could be the specific page they linked from.  For this example, you can see that we're just pulling in whatever the value of the "cid" query string parameter is, most likely a campaign code.

 

Lastly, it's important to note, that these rules get processed in order.  As soon as one of these rules is satisfied that visitor will be classified according to that rule.  For instance, if a visitor initially comes to the site through an email campaign, and bookmarks that page (including the query string parameter), when they return later to the site directly, they would still be classified as email, and not direct.

 

Now that you've set up all your channels, you should start to see the report populating:

 

 

This report, when configured properly, allows you to view, at a glance, how well your PPC campaigns do vs. your Display campaigns.  In addition, you can see first touch (how the visitor first came to the site) vs. last touch (how the visitor most recently came to the site).  Lastly, you can break down each channel (using the details you created in the prior step) to see specifically which campaign (or search engine and keyword combo, etc.) is doing the best in each channel.

 

Do you have any questions about setting up these reports?  Can't figure out how to create a rule for your specific channel?  Have you done anything really amazing with this report?  Feel free to post a comment below.

 

By Steve Pelhan, Web Analytics Implementation Analyst

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