How to attribute program success to anonymous leads who become known?

[Anonymous]

A couple of folks on my team manage our online advertising channel through a number of partners (individual sites, not PPC). In the past, we set up programs that contained campaigns watching for incoming traffic with a particular tracking tag. Doing so gave them a program status of "Clicked". The ads are tied to a free trial page and process that is governed by an independent program, so we then looked to see if the lead requested a trial through that program, at which point we change their status to Converted and declare success for the program.

Until recently, we accounted for anonymous leads by running a batch every night that looked for people who had become known and had fulfilled all the same actions. We would then set their statuses appropriately.

Well, with Is Anonymous gone, this is no longer possible. The Is Anonymous change for retroactive flow actions does not support Change Program Status as a flow step. So I thought for a minute, "Hey, we'll just use Add To List and add them to a list of people to have their status changed". Except that secondary campaigns that would fire after a retroactive flow step are not actually executed. By design:

"Secondary campaigns (campaigns triggered off of activities performed by the campaigns triggered by the lead promotion) will not be triggered."

What are my options at this point? Is there any way to mark a lead as a success in Program A if the status is dependent on actions in Program B and the lead doesn't become known until the form in Program B is submitted?

[Josh_Hill13]

Wouldn't you still be able to use Visited Page once they are Known?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Travis,

Could you store the traffic tag in a cookie (long lasting) and collect it in a hidden field when the form is filled out, then process the value accordingly?

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi again Travis,

3 ideas :

1. Use the add to list technique. Then run an hourly or daily batch for each list that takes all members of a list and add to the related program.
2. Run batches that looking into recently created leads with a "visited web page" activity with specific querystrings
3. Use a specific field that you create for this purpose. Use a change data value in the retroactive campaign to set the field value only if it is empty. the post-process all the leads and assign their acquisition program based on this field value (so that you have at least the right acquisition program).

All batches should be set to "run through the flow once" qualification rule.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thanks Grégoire! I hadn't thought about the fact that a batch job to check list additions would not be a secondary triggered campaign and therefore not subject to the new rules.

Josh, I'll give Visited Page a go, as well. See what works better overall.

[Lucho_Soto]

Travis Prebble you can also try doing a trigger campaign using the "Lead is Created" trigger in conjunction with the "Original Referrer" field. When the original referrer matches the page you are tracking, you can change the acquisition program name accordingly.  

This field is a bit hit or miss with PPC ads that encrypt referrer URLs but it may work better for your use case. Even though this method doesn't mark leads as a "success", being the acquisition program still counts towards FT and MT attribution in RCE.

[Lucho_Soto]

Now that I think about it you can also use this method to mark successes, not just acquisition programs. In a separate smart campaign, you can use the "lead is created" trigger, then add a "visited web page" filter with the querystring you are trying to track.

I don't think this method will be affected by the new changes to anonymous leads.