Google Ads Tracking Through UTMs

[Virginia_Smith]

Hello,

I recently inherited a Marketo instance and my manager is handling Google Ads. She wants to be able to track leads in Marketo that interact with our set of Google Ads and has used UTM parameters to do this in the past. For new ads, do the UTM parameters have to be set up in Google Ads or is there a way for me to do it in Marketo?

Thanks,

Virginia

[SanfordWhiteman]

You should always UTM-tag your URLs, including those that lead to Marketo LPs and those that may be sent out via Marketo but link to other non-Marketo pages.

Google will see and process your UTMs even if they are not created ahead of time in the control panel.

But I'm not sure what you mean by "do it in Marketo" -- do what exactly?

[Virginia_Smith]

Thanks for the quick response, Sanford! I'm wondering if the UTMs need to be set up in Marketo or via our Google Ads platform in this instance. I do not have experience setting up UTMs in Marketo.

[Chris_Wilcox]

Appending UTMs to a URL can be done via whatever method you like. Marketo does not have a built-in way to generate Google Analytics tagged links. Most companies use a google sheet or excel doc to manage and create tagged versions of URLs, and then users who create email assets use the tagged versions of URLs in their emails instead of non-tagged versions. 

Just so you understand, UTMs are just a set of query string items added to the end of a URL that your Google Analytics code will see and will track. GA doesn't care when or how those UTMs were added to a URL, it only knows that when it sees them, it logs them. So your process for tagging and getting those tagged URLs into your Marketo email assets doesn't really matter, so long as when your emails deploy they have those tracking codes applied. 

I hope that makes sense...  Most automation platforms do NOT have a built-in way to tag for 3rd party tracking like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, and most orgs basically manage their tagging process based on whatever their content creation processes look like. 

[Virginia_Smith]

That makes sense, thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

There's nothing to pre-set in Marketo, UTMs are actually query parameters that happen to have well-known names (the "utm_" prefix).

You can set up a program-level {{my.token}} to hold your UTMs for a given program (of course it would then apply to all assets in that program, which might not be what you want). 

[Lauren_Temmler1]

Also - you may want to set up the UTM fields in Marketo - we have smart campaigns set up that read off the Google Ad utms. For example, we have UTM_term as a field and the campaign picks up the 'clicks link' add to list/program/nurture if it includes utm_term=google.