First Touch- Anonymous update

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I am looking for ideas of the best way to track a lead's first touch with us. For example, if they click on an ad but do not fill out a form, they would remain anonymous. But if in a month, they come to the website organically and fill out a form, we want to be able to see that they originally hit that ad a month ago. I had a few ideas of how we could have built this using anonymous filters but I dont think it will work with the new workflow.

Any advice on how you're tracking this would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Erin,

We are capturing first touch information and store in a cookie, exactly as Marketo munchkin cookie, with a life duration of 730 days (as Marketo cookie).

When the lead fills out form, we capture the cookie information with hidden fields in the form.

The limit of the approach : if the lead deletes cookies, it's all lost. But then the Marketo cookie is lost as well, so all related navigation info is lost anyway.

The advantage of this approach is that it captures the info whatever the entry page on the site, either the site itself, or any Marketo hosted landing page.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Gregoire, would you mind sharing the code you used to generate this cookie? Does it have to be structured "exactly like" a Marketo munchkin cookie for the hidden form fields to recognize it?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Greg just means the cookie has the same lifetime as the Munchkin cookie (although actually this is constantly extended -- it's a misnomer to say it has a static lifetime of 730 days).

When you add hidden fields to a Marketo form, you always have the ability to Autofill values from cookies.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford. I guess what i'm trying to understand is how the Marketo form would extract the necessary values from the cookie when it's not a Marketo-generated cookie. Can I do this by just using the standard form pre-fill looking for a Cookie Value? Or should I write a piece of Javascript that looks for my custom cookie, extracts the values, and dynamically populates the form upon submit?

FWIW I'm attempting to capture original UTM parameters upon a person's first visit, store it in a cookie, and add that to their lead record when they first convert.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Can I do this by just using the standard form pre-fill looking for a Cookie Value?

Autofill, not prefill. But yes, the standard autofill doesn't care who created a cookie.  If it's in the cookie store, in goes the value.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Ryan,

The idea it to capture the UTMs on the very first visit of the lead and store them in a cookie for a long time (e.g 730 days, but it could be set otherwise) and then use Marketo form autofill capabilities when the lead fills out it's first form (sometimes months after the first visit).

Here is the code:

Cookie library, to be called first: http://infos.inficiences.com/rs/593-IYJ-660/images/js.cookie.js

The code itself: http://infos.inficiences.com/rs/593-IYJ-660/images/utmcookies.js

The code could surely be streamlined and optimized by a pro developper (which I am not), but it works

It will create a series of cookies with a long lifespan (730 days) : first_utm_campaign, first_utm_content, first_utm_medium, first_utm_source, first_utm_text, as well as a first_session_datetime cookie that will register the date/time at which these cookies were recorded. These will not be replaced if the lead comes back many times, to it will really keep the first visit, unless the lead cleanse its cookies or change device.

It will also create a series of cookies with a very short lifespan (session) : last_utm_campaign, last_utm_content, last_utm_medium, last_utm_source, last_utm_text which will contain the UTM of the entry page of the session (change each time the lead comes back).

To work correctly, the 2 JS have to be placed on all you web resources (web site, blog, Marketo LP templates, ...)

To guarantee consistency, if some UTMs are missing on the entry URL, the corresponding cookie will contain "<Empty>"

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Incredible. thank you sir, this is exactly what I have been looking for.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

In fact, you could have gotten them on our web site

-Greg

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Another approach I have used, coupled with the cookie, is making sure that your Channel tags are properly assigned. 

I have a program, that when the lead lands on (visits) a page with a particular query string including the proper Channel  tag, it assigns a certain field value for Original Acquisition Channel.

In this way you have both the original channel as well as the campaign history that this user (after becoming known, again cookie limitations apply) passed through the given campaign for visiting the landing page w/ the query parameters.