We've noticed in Google Analytics that a majority of website visitors came from default channel (Other). Drilling into the issue, it appears a google event is firing that captures utm_campaign, utm_source, and utm_medium as "null". Google responded saying we are sending 'null' as value from the datalayer variable. The IT department believes Marketo RTP is triggering these values. I was skeptical at first, but when reviewing Account Settings in RTP, I noticed that the Campaign Event setting is set to "ON".
Is it possible that Marketo RTP is firing an event call "campaign" that injects the null value in the campaign tag parameters? Has anyone else experienced this before?
I have these same boxes 'on' for my instance and I'm not getting many "other" channels in GA
Basically there's no relation between RTP campaigns and UTM params. In addition, the events that RTP sends to GA are marked as non-interaction - therefore they shouldn't have any affect on other data objects in GA (unless it has been configured differently).
In your case, I understand you use Tag Manager and it sounds like there might be some conflict with one of your data layers.
Can you provide your website URL? I can take a look.. (but it's usually not something that can be checked from the website, only in GTM)
Update: IT ruled RTP out as a possible culprit and I received some clarity around the Campaign event toggle in RTP from Support if anyone has the same question..
"The option for Campaign turns campaign data on/off for Google Analytics. It is not directly related to utm values, as it responsible for the sync of campaign data."