2 Part Question: Best Practices for Setting up Paid Ad Programs or using PMCF for UTM tracking

[Liz_Nguyen1]

Hello Community,

We are exploring more paid digital ad campaigns (ie. LinkedIn, Google) and looking at ways how others are setting up their programs in Marketo. We have tried a few out, but looking to scale for the longer-term for program management and also reporting. Apologies for the lengthy post, a bit of context below.

- We are looking to run a few different LinkedIn ads (some using OOTB LinkedIn Lead Gen Form and others pointing back to Marketo LP, or website page)

- The ads that point back to a website page, and afterwards they click on a contact us link (which is a Marketo page) we lose the attribution from the utm parameters because our marketo page opens up in a new window (with no utms). How can we attribute the form fill to the paid-ad? If we embedded a form directly on the page, would it pull in the utm values if we have hidden utm fields on the form? We are also hitting the same issue as we explored the lightbox option, because we also lose attribution from the paid-ad when the lightbox houses the Marketo form.

- we want to track lead source as paid-ads from LinkedIn and we are using UTM parameters for ads pointing back to a Marketo page. However, we are trying to understand is the best setup to be 1 Program per Paid Ad Campaign? Is it a new LP each campaign/each channel? How are others setting up their programs if they possibly have the same type of asset promoted on various paid channels and tracking lead source to the paid-ad?

We have also been investigating PMCFs however we do not use the Marketo to SFDC Campaign sync, we push people to SFDC Campaign through Add to SFDC Campaign flow step. We also do not use local forms (all global forms), we those limitations, are we still able to use PMCF to capture the utm values and sync the values to the Salesforce Campaign Member Object? or because we do not have the Marketo program and SFDC Campaign sync, it won't allow us to use PMCF?

[SanfordWhiteman]

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- The ads that point back to a website page, and afterwards they click on a contact us link (which is a Marketo page) we lose the attribution from the utm parameters because our marketo page opens up in a new window (with no utms). How can we attribute the form fill to the paid-ad? If we embedded a form directly on the page, would it pull in the utm values if we have hidden utm fields on the form?

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My answer on this other recent thread applies here.

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We are also hitting the same issue as we explored the lightbox option, because we also lose attribution from the paid-ad when the lightbox houses the Marketo form.

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There’s no reason for a lightboxed form to have any different attribution than an inline form. Did you truly use Marketo’s lightbox option? Or did you put the form embed in an IFRAME (very different)?

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We have also been investigating PMCFs however we do not use the Marketo to SFDC Campaign sync, we push people to SFDC Campaign through Add to SFDC Campaign flow step. We also do not use local forms (all global forms), we those limitations, are we still able to use PMCF to capture the utm values and sync the values to the Salesforce Campaign Member Object? or because we do not have the Marketo program and SFDC Campaign sync, it won't allow us to use PMCF?

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Well, you can always use PMCFs regardless of your SFDC Campaign sync.

You can’t automatically sync Marketo PMCF values to SFDC Campaign Member custom fields unless you link SFDC campaign ↔︎ Marketo program using the built-in sync.

We have a custom setup at one client where we use a webhook to sync PMCFs to CMCFs, but it’s one-way (that is, from Marketo → SFDC) and doesn’t allow changes on the SFDC side.

[Liz_Nguyen1]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman  - thanks for the insights.

I would need to confirm whether the issue is with lighbox from Marketo or is through iFrame.

Interested in learning more about PMCFs as originally from the documentation, I thought we could only use them if we have the form locally at the program level and we only utilize global forms. Is there a way that we can still use PMCFs for global forms, do you also recommend PMCF to track UTM values? How is the webhook setup to push the data one way into SFDC? I am not well verse is creating webhooks so would need some guidance to discuss with developer.

I also wondering if you had any thoughts on program setup best practices for paid digital ads as I know with Marketo, many ways to set it up, but would prefer to get off on the right track early on. 

"Well, you can always use PMCFs regardless of your SFDC Campaign sync.

You can’t automatically sync Marketo PMCF values to SFDC Campaign Member custom fields unless you link SFDC campaign ↔︎ Marketo program using the built-in sync.

We have a custom setup at one client where we use a webhook to sync PMCFs to CMCFs, but it’s one-way (that is, from Marketo → SFDC) and doesn’t allow changes on the SFDC side."

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Interested in learning more about PMCFs as originally from the documentation, I thought we could only use them if we have the form locally at the program level and we only utilize global forms.

 Well, “use” has multiple meanings. 😉

You can still use PMCFs in a global forms environment using Change Program Data flow steps or via the API, but you can’t set PMCFs directly as form fields unless it’s a local form.

[Liz_Nguyen1]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman - took a look at the other options in the thread and interested in #2 a bit more.

"Server-side attribution implemented via a webhook-compatible service. These use the Marketo REST API to attribute conversions to previous web activities, even across devices. They can create Marketo Custom Objects, so you can view multiple conversions for the same person. The advantage here is you don’t need anything else running in the browser, as Munchkin is already doing the lifting."

- Does this work for people who are unknown to our instance and become known after form fill? If they click on a utm-tracked link from a paid ad, arrive to our website, click on a contact us link (Marketo LP), fill out the form. Can the webhook look at previous web activity because we tested a few form fills and there was no website activity log (first activity is person created from form fill). How does one get started with this option?

- Can it be used to back date previous form fills and grab their utm parameters at the time of submission? Or is this a forward looking option?

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Can the webhook look at previous web activity because we tested a few form fills and there was no website activity log (first activity is person created from form fill).

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Previous anonymous web activity should be merged into the new lead as long as the activity is <=90 days old and you have Munchkin on the page. Sounds like a fundamental misconfiguration if you’re not seeing previous Visit Web Page — this is a standard feature!*

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- Can it be used to back date previous form fills and grab their utm parameters at the time of submission? Or is this a forward looking option?

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Sure, you can backfill people with the same ‘hook, even if their Filled Out Form was from a long time ago.

However, you don’t want to scan a huge number of Activity Log pages for a single person, principally because you have a max of 30 seconds for webhook processing. So instead you give a hint about the backfill timeframe based on Smart List criteria.

For example, create a Smart List of people who had a Filled Out Form in January and set the webhook to look back from January 31st. Then create a Smart List of people who had a Filled Out Form in Feb and set the  ‘hook to look back from Februrary 29th. And so on. Basically you need 25 backfill runs, one for each of the past 25 months. Or depending on your traffic maybe you could do a few months at a time, hard to say without a deeper dive.

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*n.b. you can turn this off using the non-standard Munchkin option cookieAnon —

but hopefully nobody made this change in your instance!

[Liz_Nguyen1]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman ,

I was reading through your blog post on decoding URLs for attribution.

I was wondering if this setup could also be used in our current use case of paid-ad traffic (but possibly for other use cases of identifying which webpage they were on before landing onto Marketo page) for getting the referrer URL the person was on (website page with utms) prior to clicking onto a Marketo LP and submitting the form on the LP? If the referrer URL contained utm params would it be able to pull full URL including utm params into the field lastMarketoFormReferrerURL? I would also need a new field to store the form referrer URL - correct? Where would the code snippet need to be added to our Marketo LP templates to run properly?

Would it also pull in the referrer URL if it isn't on a shared domain/sub-domain? 

Thanks again - your insights and help are truly appreciated!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Appreciate you reading that post!

But it doesn’t really have anything to do with how to persist UTMs across pageviews. It’s suggesting that encoded URLs can be hard for end users to read, so when a URL is “at rest” for reporting purposes, the unencoded characters can be shown.

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... If the referrer URL contained utm params would it be able to pull full URL including utm params into the field lastMarketoFormReferrerURL?

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As long as the referring page doesn’t truncate the URL down to just the protocol + hostname (a.k.a. origin): yes.

By default, pages on the same origin will pass full referrers to each other, but they can be configured to be more restrictive and pass just the origin.

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Would it also pull in the referrer URL if it isn't on a shared domain/sub-domain? 

If the 2 pages aren’t on the same origin (e.g. https://www.example.com and https://pages.example.com are different origins, as different as https://www.example.com and https://www.example.info in this case) then by default you will not see the full referrer, although the source page can opt in to passing the full referrer, if you control it.

Fully 3rd party pages like search engines won’t pass the full referrer for privacy reasons, and you can’t opt them in because you don’t control them.