Google Analytics-Marketo Lead Attribution

[Justin_Cook]

Our team is having trouble capturing the accurate person source for leads before they are pushed into Salesforce. We are currently using Bizible to piece all of this information together after the fact, but that means lead source in Salesforce is wrong and we have to manually update those leads. We we’re hoping to solve this issue by pushing our Google Analytics data into Marketo but so far, it’s been a nightmare as I’ve not seen a clear answer (or script) of how to accomplish this.

We are using UTMs for our paid ads but since Marketo doesn’t automatically store this information, it’s basically been useless outside of Google Analytics.

Here is what we want to do:

1. Properly attribute Lead Source to Person Source in Marketo before the information is pushed into Salesforce, preferably pulling that information from Google Analytics
2. Capture and push UTM parameters (when present) into Marketo

[SanfordWhiteman]

Please explain "capture and push UTM params" in detail. How many sets of params (touches)? Expiring when?

We use an extremely robust (though client-side JS only) library to track attribution. But typically this is used by people who can't *afford* the likes of Bizible. I wouldn't advise it for a Bizible shop, I would predict extreme confusion (Rule 1 of analytics and attribution: don't have another system with different rules and similar-sounding conclusions!).

[Justin_Cook]

We would like to set a cookie (or access the Google Analytics cookie) that stores the UTM information of the user that visits our web pages (which the Google Analytics cookie already does but I'm not sure how to tap into that information) and then be able to add that information into Marketo. We already have the hidden fields for UTMs setup on our forms but our site doesn't set a cookie to store the UTM information at the moment.

We define Source, Medium, Campaign, & Content in our UTMs, expire in 1 year. The hope is to get the First Touch & Last Touch sources (at least into Salesforce) before the lead is created. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

The GA cookie doesn't store the data itself, but it acts as a key to the data on the GA server side.

And while you could re-fetch that data from Marketo using the GA API, unless you were doing some kind of complex session unification thing, it doesn't make sense to incur that development (and processing) overhead since the same exact data was available earlier in the browser session.

You might read my ultralight UTM forwarder post and related links, and try Yanir's lightweight UTM forwarder library. There are numerous JS libraries purporting to do the same for Marketo forms... some work fine, some have giant bugs (usu. race conditions).