Hi Kevin,
I'm also using the Channels extension, though found the extension needed a lot of bespoke work to get working as I want (trying to mimic the Adobe Analytics "channel stacking" report that Adobe Consulting configure). I'm almost there with some great help from Tealium's support team.
I wanted to record the channel in a stack each time a visit starts (PPC, display, natural search, affiliate, social, redirects, email etc) and also record the channel each time someone goes to another site and then back to my site within the same visit. Eg, I may start a session using PPC and check out a competitor site a few mins later and then come back to my site again via PPC (perhaps using the same or a different adword click).
To do this I needed:
- An extension for a list of social site referring domains
- Another for natural search (Adobe Analytics is great here as it maintains a list for you)
- A campaign code syntax per managed channel (similar to Dan's comment above)
- A cookie to determine if the page view is the 1st page view in a visit; which is then used to stop unwanted channel values from firing on each page view
- Set the "channels" hierarchy rules in the Channel Extension. This is very messy / horrible process as you can't add rules in the position you want without deleting and starting again (I believe an update may be offered to allow drag-and-drop)
I should have it properly working next week. Let me know if you need any more help.
If it helps, the cookie extension code is:
if (typeof utag.loader.RC('first_page_view') === 'object') {
var browserName=navigator.appName;
var expirydate= "expires=0";
if (browserName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer") {
expirydate='';
}
document.cookie = "first_page_view=false" + ";path=/;domain=" + utag.cfg.domain + ";"+ expirydate;
b.first_page_view='true';
}