HockeyStack Academy 102 - Step 2.3 - Create your “Unified Channel” property

Paid Search — Google Ads

Why are we selecting the Touchpoint Type = Website Session filter?

Because there are a lot of types of actions that may match the UTM Source and UTM Medium ruleset that we have for Google Ads. Namely:

• Start a session
• Enter a page
• Click on things
• Scroll down
• Submit a form
• Exit page
• End session

Let’s say you have a linear attribution table that uses Unified Channel. Unified channel has only Google ads and LinkedIn ads defined, both without touchpoint type.

Let’s say you have a deal worth $100k from a company that had two website sessions, one from google, one from linkedin. The google session lasted 10 seconds and it’s someone who clicked on a brand ad and clicked everywhere on the website without reading. There are 90 actions in this session. The linkedin session is a proper icp visitor, who spent 15 minutes on the website reading two pages without clicking anywhere and submitted a demo form. There are 10 actions in this session.

In this case, since touchpoint type is not used, all 100 actions are considered “attribution touchpoints”. Linear attribution gives Google $90k credit while it gives LinkedIn $10k credit.

Consider the case where we set Touchpoint Type = Website Session — Each session includes 1 action. Linear gives both Google and LinkedIn $50k credit.

This is why for all property mappings related to website data, it’s a good practice to set Touchpoint Type.

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Paid Social — LinkedIn Ads

In the LinkedIn Ads mapping, we suggest having both clicks on the website, and the ad engagements + video completions included.

There are a two important concepts to note here:

1. We created two separate mappings that map to the same value. These will be merged together in all reports we create. You can think of it like an additional OR block. Website visits with the UTM OR Ad engagements and video completions from the integration.
2. We used Action Name for the engagement data from the integration. Here’s an easy way to find all available action names:

Finding a list of all Action Names

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Organic Social and Organic Search

Instead of adding many OR statements, we used regex to simplify these definitions. You can take a look at our regex guide in the article below:

The Marketer’s Guide to Using Regex

Also, you can duplicate a mapping by clicking the icon on the top right. In this case Organic Social and Organic Search definitions were similar, so duplicating Organic Search saved us time.

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Email Marketing

Another property that is very helpful when building Unified Channel is the “integration” property. If there are multiple integrations generating actions with the same Action Name, it’s useful to add a filter with the integration property.

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Events

For Salesforce users, it’s a good idea to add all Salesforce campaign-related touchpoints into Unified Channel. Useful properties to use: campaign_type, campaign_name, campaign_member_status, campaign_member_responded.

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Other Referral Traffic

For website data, there are usually a lot of other referring sites that don’t fall into the Paid or Organic bucket. We like to bucket them all under Other Referral Traffic.

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Congrats! You have all the channel definitions created as defined properties!