How to edit Channel Assignments

What are Channel Assignments?

Channel Assignments are a set of rules which tell Corvidae which Channel to assign each visit to, based on parameters your marketing links contain; the most important of which are medium, source, and custom.

Every Corvidae account comes with a default set of Channel Assignment rules which should categorise a majority of your traffic correctly without any input from you. If you find traffic which is assigned to the wrong channel while you are browsing your reports however, this guide will help.

How do I add rules to my Channel Assignments?

Let’s say you have an Aggregator relationship with the PriceRunner comparison site, but you find a PriceRunner Campaign in the Referrers Channel, head over to your Channel Assignments page and follow these steps:

1. If you use a standard tagging schema, and you know your Aggregator ads are all tagged with a Medium, for example utm_medium=Aggs then adding the following rule will catch all Aggregator traffic so long as you always mark up your Aggregator links in the same way.

   

Channel Assignment rules are case insensitive so there is no need to worry about correct capitalisation.

2. If you use a slight variations of the utm_medium parameter for different Aggregators, for example aggregators_pr for PriceRunner and aggregator_idealo for Idealo, then the starts or contains conditions may be a better option to catch multiple Aggregators with a single rule. Either of the following rules will suffice.

   

3. If you don’t use a standard Medium for your Aggregator tagging, then it may be necessary to use another parameter like source. In this situation you will have to create a new rule for each Aggregator which will make your Channel Assignments more difficult to read, and will require new rules to be added whenever your Aggregators change. Where possible it is better to catch a lot of traffic with a broad rule than a small amount of traffic with a specific one. Given the above situation, where utm_source=pr and utm_source=idealo parameters are used in your advertising links, the following 2 rules would properly categorise this traffic.

   

4. If you have centralised your analytics tagging into a single custom parameter such as my_custom_param=AD_AGG_Idealo_Campaign-Name where the substring _AGG_ is the marker which identifies this click as being from an Aggregator, then this rule will catch all Aggregator clicks.

   

Your custom parameter must be defined for this rule to work. If you have not yet set up a custom parameter and would like to, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

These 4 steps will handle most, if not all your Channel Assignment cases. It is possible to apply these rules to the campaign, referrer and referrer domain parameters, however this approach requires continuous maintenance. It is generally better to standardise the way you tag your advertising than to maintain an exhaustive list of specific assignment rules.

Remember to Save your Channel Assignments before you exit. Leaving the page before saving will discard all changes.

Best Practices

Fewer rules are better

As mentioned above, it is better to use a simple rule which categorises a large volume of clicks, than a lot of very specific rules which require maintenance.

Change your tagging, not your rules

If you find yourself in a situation where you have more than a couple of rules catching traffic for a single Channel, it is likely better to standardise the way you mark up your advertising links rather than creating a very long ruleset.

Be verbose enough

It is worth ensuring that your rule will only catch the traffic you intend it to. For example, a rule which catches any source which contains compare intended to catch visits from comparethemarket will inadvertently categorise traffic from gocompare the same way.

Order your rules

Channel Assignment rules are run procedurally from top to bottom, so if a visit from mail.google.com is caught by a rule which assigns any referrer domain which contains google to Search, a later rule intended to catch any referrer domain which starts with mail.google will never fire because all gmail traffic will already have been allocated to Search. In the following example the second rule will never fire.

Channel Assignment rules can be dragged into any order using the handle to the left of the rule.

Some short values are not allowed

For the sake of safety we insist on a minimum length in some cases. If you were to apply a rule that any referrer domain which contains . should be assigned to referrer, all of your traffic would appear as a referral, because all domains contain .. For this reason the following limitations are in place.