Bizible tracking Marketo emails as web referral touchpoints

[Bryant_Chang]

Wanted to see if anyone was using Bizible?

We are currently implementing Bizible and running into a issue where our branded email tracking links are being categorized as "web referrals" attributions.

When speaking with our account rep, the solution is to add URL parameters "[branded.email].com?utm_medium=mkto_email".

Or something along those lines.

We currently do not add these tags to our generic emails so would have to do this manually.

Is anyone else having/had this issue? and have a solution/workaround?

Bryant

[SanfordWhiteman]

They don't have a way to exclude a referrer (as you would want with other internal properties) nor to name a traffic source based on referrer match alone?

[Bryant_Chang]

Sanford Whiteman​

They apparently cannot create exclusion rules on subdomains (info.brand.com) only the main domain (brand.com).

We were told differentiating on subdomains is on their roadmap.

This could be the option we decide to take, depending on if we are ok with all the other subdomains that we would be excluding.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hmmyeah, that seem like an ill-thought-out design if you ask me!

In our internal attribution script, we assign fields (with friendly names) based on pattern matches on referrer. So when referrer = click.example.com, the Medium is automatically set to "email," etc.

In your case, if you did another redirect (before loading Bizible) when you recognize your branding domain as referrer, you could add the utm_medium onto the URL and have it logged correctly.

[Bryant_Chang]

Sanford Whiteman​

1. For your internal attribution script, do you ever run into cases where the browser breaks the referrer page so the script doesnt pick up and update the medium field?

2. Is there and automated way to add utms to urls when sending marketo emails?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

1. For your internal attribution script, do you ever run into cases where the browser breaks the referrer page so the script doesnt pick up and update the medium field?

We don't rely primarily (let alone solely) on the referrer, preferring source-tagging whenever it's possible.  But if someone links to your site from a blog or Tweet, they aren't going to include your UTMs.

As long as your destination site is running over https:// and the source site doesn't make specific moves to strip the referrer (such as the referrer <meta> tag or bouncing traffic off an interstitial page to remove the query string), you will get referrer information.  Privacy plugins can also be used by the lead her/himself to strip referrer information, but they can also strip UTMs, so I don't worry too much about that angle.

2. Is there and automated way to add utms to urls when sending marketo emails?

There isn't. You can (and should) tokenize your URLs but you can't still force users to include everything you want. I wrote a bookmarklet once that scanned the HTML of a preview to see that all URLs matched a certain pattern. Problem is there are always exceptions, and if you know users you know they'll tend toward skipping steps if there's the option.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Here's a link to that bookmarklet if you want to try it: Bmlet :: UTM Checker

It just scans all the <A> tags to see if they each have at least one utm_* query param.  You can set it to ignore a link by adding the attribute data-bypass-utm-checker.

[Bryant_Chang]

Thanks! This should be helpful.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Bryant Chang​​ also blogged here: http://blog.teknkl.com/utm-checker-bookmarklet-for-marketo/

[Justin_Norris1]

Bryant Chang​

Just to confirm, I have done a number of Bizible/Marketo implementations and UTM parameters are the way to go.

It's a pain but tokenize the URLs like Sanford suggests and then you can populate values at the program level and it's not so bad. Your email programs should ideally be tokenized anyways.