What is a Marketing Channel anyway?
Sounds like an easy question, right? But the answer is somewhat flexible.
Every brand might define their marketing channel somewhat differently.
At the end of the day however, a channel is the unification of data from different datasources based on some rules.
The Channel Builder in Klar gives each brand the flexibility to define the rules for themselves and enrich and unify their data from different sources with these three dimensions:
Channel Name - a freely namely dimension for a channel
Channel Category - a set of 14 categories each channel falls into like Paid Social, Influencer, Organic Search or Direct
Channel Group - three groups that define the kind of channel -> Paid, Brand and Owned.
In order to get the most insights out of Klar, it is vital to correctly set up these channel rules. Most of these rules will be based on clean naming convention (eg. UTM parameters).
So if you have any questions with setting these up correctly, please feel free to reach out to us. We are very happy to help you getting your channels just the way you want them.
There will be several channels added to your Klar account per default with corresponding "usual" channel rules. Check and adjust them to your individual UTM parameter logic.
How is the different type of data being mapped
There are three different types of data that we are mapping to a channel:
Channel Performance & Costs = your costs, clicks and order based on the attribution logic in the different ad account -> taken from your connected Ad Accounts and Custom Costs Google Sheet.
Session & Onpage Behaviour = Sessions, Bounces, Time on Site, Cart Rate etc. taken from your Google Analytics Account.
Orders & Revenue = We use Shopify data as a base and then match Google Analytics data on it as it has more reliable channel information. If there is a match, Google Analytics data overwrites Shopify data, if not Shopify's data remains (Illustrated
How to create a new Channel
Go to your Store Configurator in the settings menu and to to the Channels section at the top
There'll be several channels created per default
To add a channel, press "+ Create Channel" to create a new channel.
Give the channel a name and select the matching Channel Category and Group.
Connect the relevant datasources to the channel and apply filters when necessary using the AND/OR Conditions and Groups.
Save the Channel configuration.
Should certain data match into multiple channels based on the filters that you configured in each, drag the one with the higher priority above the other.
Conditions and Groups - How do they work?
Depending on the datasource, you have different dimension you can access to build filters for a datasource to match into the relevant data for that channel.
You can use conditions for different dimension at the same time. If you want both/all of them to be true to match, you need to use the AND statement. If only one needs to be true to match into the channel, you need to use the OR state.
At times, you might want to combine an AND and an OR statement. That is also totally possible by using groups as you define a logic for each group and then define the statement for the group separately.
The example below would match if the utm_medium contains cpc AND the utm_campaign contains brand OR _b_ AND the utm_source contains google OR bing.
Unlike Google Analytics, we do not look at upper or lower caps so if you type google we would match into both google as well as Google or even GooGLe.
Direct and Google Orders
This is a bit of a special scenario as orders that are not in Google Analytics likely will not have any utm information and therefore contain n/a.
But as we us Shopify as fallback, some of these orders will have information in the field Shopify Visit Source - most commonly Direct or Google.
Direct you can simple match into your Direct Channel.
The problem with Google is that you don't know if it's Brand Search, Generic Search or Organic Search. So you have two options.
Match it into the biggest existing channel which likely will be Branded Paid Search
Create an additional Channel called something like Google Fallback.
The set up for Option 2 would look like this.
If you use the Shopify Visit Source be sure to give that Channel the lowest priority so that it doesn't overwrite orders which actually have utm information.
Any if nothing matches
If you set your channels up right, you should match into 100% of all traffic and costs.
However, there will likely be Orders that have n/a in all dimensions and can't be matched into anything. These will show you in the respective reports as Default.
Examples
In order to give you some ideas, what a channel set up could look like, please take a look at the following article.