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 don't affect your raw data and Amplitude computes them on the fly.

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 your existing charts update retroactively to reflect the new definition.

Feature availability

• Starter and Plus plans can create one classifier.
• Growth and Enterprise plans can create unlimited classifiers.

Create a channel

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

To create a channel, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Properties section of Amplitude Data and open the Channels tab.

2. Click + Add Channel Classifier. A pre-built, default channel definition screen opens. 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.

   

   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 the values for each row. Each cell must evaluate to True for an event to classify to that channel.

   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. Amplitude labels channels in property dropdowns 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.

Amplitude attributes metrics 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.

Use cases

• Blended views: Easily create top level blended views of all paid and all organic traffic to easily see how efficiency and performance have changed over time.
• High-level channels: 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, 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

Amplitude evaluates these special values on events: