Enhance Programs by allowing anonymous leads

[Anonymous]

This is necessary, for example, to measure effectiveness of online lead generation activity.

Say you run an online ad to attract new visitors to your website.  Say it costs $100 per month and you want to track how many clicks it generates, and attribute future sales to the ad.  Sounds just like a Program?  The standard setup even has a status called "Online Advertising > Clicked". 

New visitors, however, can never get to this state, because Marketo rejects anonymous leads being added to Programs.

Even if your lead goes on to place an order, since they're not in the program, the sale isn't attributed correctly.

Marketo tracks anonymous leads by placing cookies on their browsers so it can monitor repeat visits, etc.  Let's allow anonymous leads within Programs, then we can see within Marketo which of our ads are worth the money.

[Anonymous]

Hi Phil, I'll need to be implementing a workaround similar to yours. What I don't understand is the first bit about using a unique code that becomes part of the Referrer, and subsequently updating your "Original Ad Campaign" field. Could you elaborate please? Many thanks!

[Anonymous]

I think he's referring to a querystring parameter.  We do this as well and use the SFDC campaign ID as the "unique code" (e.g. sfdcid=70160000000X3Ay).  If it is the first time a lead visits our site, ocur cookie creation javascript sets the value of a sfdcid_original cookie to this value.  We also set the value of a sfdcid_current cookie each time as well.  We read these into hidden fields in our forms and they allow us to set a Lead Source value as well as ensuring that the lead is added to the appropriate acquisition program when they become known.

[Anonymous]

Hi Andrew,

Its pretty simple - just add a unique "tracking" code as a parameter to any of the external URL's you use to refer people to any of your pages. For exampe in Google Adwords your landing page URL would be "http://www.avoka.com?utm_source=google_adwords". For other ad campaigns or promotions you run use a different & unique value in the "utm_source".

In Marketo create a SmartCampaign for for each of these unique campaigns (hate the way Campaign is used in so many contexts) - and in the who section say "visits any page where teh referrer contains "utm_source=google_adwords" etc.

In actions what I do is say if "Avoka Source Campign is empty" (don't want to overwrite existing values) then set "Avoka Source Campaign=google_adwords".

This bypasses the need for doing anything with cookies etc - I honestly don't understand why this is not a standard feature of Marketo - but OTOH - its pretty neat that you can do this pretty easily.

We shoudl all be lobbying for this type of functionality to be incorporated. 

At this stage we shoudl also be able to add someone to a Marketo program - even althouth they are annonymous. We should be able to put an expiry on their membership saying that if tehy have not converted in N days remove them from membership.

That woudl be ideal!