Automatically add Medium and Source UTM parameters within emails?

[sam-imagethink]

I'm a marketing team of one, who recently migrated to Marketo from Act-On. 

Currently, all Marketo email directed traffic is showing up in my Google Analytics account as direct traffic, and I've been advised that adding UTM parameters to my emails will resolve the mischaracterization.

I don't have the bandwidth to implement a robust UTM program, creating different content parameters for each link within an email.

Rather, I am hoping there is a way to append the Medium and Source utm parameters to all links within an email, either somewhere within the admin panel, or perhaps by using tokens?

If there is a better solution for making sure that Marketo email directed traffic shows up as email traffic, rather than direct, in Analytics, I'm all ears. 

Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions.

[SanfordWhiteman]

All traffic that originates from Marketo-tracked emails will have your branding domain (e.g. tracking domain) as the referrer. That's the easiest way to identify it.

There's no way to automatically attach UTM params to every link in an email. You should use a Program-level {{my.token}} to store the UTM params, yes, but you still need to remember to add that to every link. This is easily done when your links come from variables or from other tokens, but breaks down when people use the WYSIWYG editor to add their own links on-the-fly.

[sam-imagethink]

Hi Sanford,

Thanks for your response; using the branding domain was my thought as well, however the traffic is not showing up as Referral traffic. It is being tracked as direct traffic, so there is no referral path.

I set up the branding domain as directed by the Marketo documentation, and used "engage.{mydomain.net}" as my branding domain for emails. No traffic in my analytics account is being documented as being referred by that url, though.

Any additional thoughts?

[SanfordWhiteman]

The referrer has to be present unless you're doing some additional internal redirection.

Follow a tracked Marketo link, then on the destination page, open F12 Console and type

document.referrer

[Traci_Taylor]

I can confirm the exact same thing is happening to me. We were recently acquired and changed our branding domain from info.aspeinc.com to email.cprime.com. Now, none of my emails are showing up in referral traffic, but showing up in direct traffic instead. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Please provide a sample tracked link that is displaying this behavior.

I'd wager it has to do with the branding domain having SSL but the final URL being plain http. In this case the referrer will not be sent for security reasons.

[cgrove]

Hi -  email.domain.com -> domain.com counts as direct traffic in Google Analytics. Need to find a way to have subdomain referral traffic have its source/medium be email. So far had no luck using google analytics filters. It would be a shame to have to use a different domain name as the tracking domain so that it would be considered a referral.  Any idea how to get this setup in google analytics correctly?

[Tyjen_Conley]

has anyone been able to solve for this yet? We're coming up with the same issue.

[SanfordWhiteman]

What are you trying to do exactly? There are a few different areas discussed in this thread.