Breakdowns are used to organize your channels, campaigns, adsets, and ads in any way you'd like. They are a handy tool that can be utilized across almost all pages in your dashboard.

In this guide, we'll cover:

• Northbeam's Default Breakdowns
• Making a Custom Breakdown
• Editing a Default Breakdown

Northbeam's Default Breakdowns

We provide 4 default breakdowns, and many of our customers also choose to create custom breakdowns for specific groupings.

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"Platform (Northbeam)"

In this breakdown, Channels are grouped by their respective platforms. For example: Facebook Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads, Twitter, Organic, Organic Search, etc.

You’ll also see a group named “Other.” We categorize any miscellaneous traffic here, so it’s important to check this and regroup if necessary.

How the "Platform (Northbeam)" Breakdown Works

The Platform (Northbeam) breakdown automatically sorts every visit, click, and conversion into a standardized set of channel names, such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads, and Organic Search, so you can compare performance across all of your marketing in one place.

This breakdown is maintained by Northbeam and applied automatically to every account.

How a Visit Is Classified

For each visit, Northbeam evaluates a prioritized list of platforms and assigns the first matching platform.

Because more specific platforms are evaluated before broader catch-all categories, well-tagged ad traffic is typically classified before falling through to categories such as Organic, Unattributed, or Other.

To classify a visit, Northbeam evaluates four primary signals:

Note: UTM matching is case-insensitive. "Equals" means the value must match exactly. "Contains" means the value may appear anywhere within the field.

Platform Definitions

Note: Platform definitions are maintained by Northbeam and updated over time as new advertising platforms, integrations, and tagging conventions emerge.

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"Category (Northbeam)"

Channels are grouped by a higher-level category. For example, Paid Prospecting, Paid Performance Max, Paid branded Search, SMS, Affiliate, etc.

We normally don’t edit the groups of this breakdown since our view-through model uses these pre-set categorizations for the weighting in our Clicks + Modeled Views model.

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"Targeting (Northbeam)"

Channels are grouped by their targeting. For example, Paid Branded Search, Paid Shopping, Paid Display, Paid NonBrand Search.

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"Revenue Source (Northbeam)"

Channels are grouped by their source. This breakdown only has two groups:

• Online Store - orders from your Shopify Connection or Server API Connection
• Amazon - Ads and Organic - orders from your Amazon Integration (if relevant)

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Want to see the segments of our Default Breakdowns?

At the bottom of this page, see the segments for each of our default breakdowns. Our system categorizes your campaigns based on predefined rules.

Making a Custom Breakdown

You may have a specific breakdown in mind that doesn't align with our defaults. You can easily create custom breakdowns using our Breakdown Manager.

Learn how to use our Breakdown Manager below. Find timestamps within the video as well.

What the video covers

The video above walks through:

• Creating breakdowns from scratch
• Using campaign names, UTM parameters, platforms, and custom spend sheet values as breakdown logic
• The difference between the Simple Editor and Advanced Editor
• Previewing matched campaigns before saving rules
• Creating manual label overrides
• Duplicating and customizing Northbeam's default breakdowns
• Common breakdown use cases such as funnel stages, regions, products, and high-level marketing buckets

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Editing a Default Breakdown

Want to make a slight tweak to a default breakdown? No problem. Instead of creating a new breakdown, here's how to edit an existing one.

Step 1: Navigate to the Breakdowns Manager

1. In the upper right corner, click ☰
2. Click Manage Breakdowns

You'll be taken to the tab called Manage Breakdowns. This is where you can see and manage all of the breakdowns in your account. What you have to do is create a new breakdown and name it the exact same name as the default breakdown you want to edit — more on that in Step 2.

As a reminder, here are our default breakdown names:

• Platform (Northbeam)
• Targeting (Northbeam)
• Revenue Source (Northbeam)
• Category (Northbeam) - NOTE: Please do not edit this breakdown. Our MTA models (Clicks-Only and Clicks + Modeled Views) uses its breakdown assignments to determine how much weight specific channels receive. Editing could result in data inaccuracies.

Step 2: Click Add Breakdown and name it the same as the default breakdown you'd like to edit.

For example, to edit our default Platform breakdown, name your new one Platform (Northbeam).

Step 3: From here, any edits made will reflect in the default platform breakdown.

Default Breakdown Segments

Segments for Platform (Northbeam)

Below is a list of our most commonly-used segments:

• Facebook Ads
• Google Ads
• YouTube Ads
• TikTok Ads
• Pinterest Ads
• Snapchat Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Amazon Ads and Organic
• Organic
• Organic Search
• Facebook Organic
• Klaviyo
• Unattributed
• Excluded
• Other

Segments for Category (Northbeam)

Below is a list of our most commonly-used segments:

• Paid - Prospecting
• Paid - Performance Max
• Paid - Nonbranded Search
• Paid - Other
• Paid - Branded Search
• Paid - Awareness
• Organic
• Organic Search
• Email
• Unattributed
• Other
• Organic Social
• Affiliate

Segments for Targeting (Northbeam)

Below is a list of our most commonly-used segments:

• Paid - Prospecting
• Paid - Nonbranded Search
• Paid - Branded Search
• Paid - Smart Shopping
• Paid - Other
• Paid - Video
• Paid - Retargeting
• Paid - Display

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Important: Renaming an existing breakdown is treated as creating a completely new breakdown internally.

Renaming or deleting breakdowns that are already being used in saved views, dashboards, MMM models, or other reporting workflows can cause:

• Saved view errors
• Missing or broken dashboard tiles
• MMM/model segmentation issues
• Previously configured reports to stop working correctly

We strongly recommend avoiding renaming or deleting actively-used breakdowns unless absolutely necessary. If you need to make major changes, consider creating a new breakdown instead.

If you're unsure whether a breakdown is being used elsewhere in your account, please contact Support before making changes.

Please reach out to your Media Strategist, Customer Success Manager, or contact Support if you have any questions.