Define your acquisition channels using channels

Marketers often want to define their acquisition channels based on UTM and referrer data. Amplitude’s channels allow you to create new properties retroactively, based on functions and operators you can apply across multiple existing properties. These do not affect your raw data and will be computed retroactively and on the fly.

NOTE: This feature is only available to customers on Growth and Enterprise plans.

For example, you may want to understand the distribution of organic traffic to your site. Define a version of your channels that includes the known social and search domains at that time. When a new social or search channel becomes prevalent, you can update your organic search definition and all of your existing charts will update retroactively to reflect the new definition.

Create a channel

You must be an Admin or Manager to create a channel.

To create a channel, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to where you manage your project's taxonomy—either Govern or the Properties section of Amplitude Data—and open the Channel tab.
2. Click + Add Classifier. A pre-built, default channel definition screen will open. Optionally, click the default channel title (“Channel”) to edit the name. You can also add a description below it, if you like.
3. To begin creating the definition of the channel, start from the default template or click Clear Table to clear the table's contents and start from scratch.
   
   
   
   You can add multiple properties to a row to create a more complex classifier.
   
   
4. Add one row for each channel you would like to define. For example, you can add rows labeled Paid, Organic, Referral, and Direct to create a high-level channel definition.
5. Fill in the values for each row. Each cell must evaluate to True for an event to be classified to that channel.
   
   TIP: If a channel could be defined as row A OR row B, you can add one row for A and one row for B, and then set the channel name to be the same for both rows.
6. Click Save. Channels will be denoted in property drop downs under the Channels category.

Compare metrics between channels with Data Tables

Amplitude’s data tables allow you to define metrics critical to your bottom line, such as CPA, AOV and ROAS. Evaluate how these metrics perform between different channels by grouping by your channel on the left-hand column. To see how these channels break down further, add other core dimensions like campaigns.

Metrics can be attributed in different ways if a user has multiple touch points with different channels before converting. Amplitude has built attribution modeling into data tables to enable defining user attribution in your channels.

NOTE: Applying a channel classifier before an attribution model can attribute values in potentially unexpected ways. For example, in a sequence consisting of

CPC --> email --> website

applying a channel classifier of CPC only will result in email and website being filtered out. In this case, the attribution model would attribute to CPC.

Use cases

• Blended views: Easily create top level blended views of all paid and all organic traffic to easily see how efficiency and performance has changed over time.
• High-level channels: You can break down your core metrics according to the common definitions of channels you already use in Google Analytics and Adobe.
• Channels with campaigns: Add a property denoting a campaign as a column in your channel definitions, in order to break down metrics by campaign channels.
• Attribution: Use channels in conjunction with attribution models in data tables to evaluate the breakdown of a metric by first, last, or a custom attribution definition.

Special values

These special values will be evaluated on events: