How to create unique tracking URLs for landing pages?

[Anonymous]

HI all,

Sending out my first campaign soon. How do I create a unique URL tracking URL for our landing page so I can measure our most effective channels/tactics? 

For instance I want different tracking URLs for:
PR
Owned social media
Influencer social media
Email
Blog
Paid advertising

It seems like it'd be obvious but I haven't found a good resource in the community. I found these two articles but neither have a clear answer to me:

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000POegAAG
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PuakAAC

I found this great article on how Hubspot does it - is that not a feature of Marketo yet? http://knowledge.hubspot.com/landing-page-user-guide/how-to-create-a-tracking-url-for-a-landing-page

I found this article on how to do it using Google Analytics: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/utm-parameters-video/ but would prefer to do this in Marketo to consolidate all reporting.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hi Christine, if you're looking to track the source in a field in Marketo, then you can use a hidden field on the landing page, and populate it via URL parameters. If you're just looking to track page views and where they came from after the fact, you don't necessarily need the hidden field on the form, but you can add just about anything you want at the end of the actual page URL after a question mark ?

[Anonymous]

Christine,

Congrats on planning your first campaign.

A common way to track referral source is with UTM parameters, as described by the Kissmetrics article.

To do this in Marketo, you'll need to create custom UTM fields in Marketo as well for the fields you want to track, and then add them as hidden fields to all forms you'd like to track, as Dory mentioned above. Here's a guide on how to do that. After you do this, UTM information will be stored on lead records in Marketo.

Note that Google Analytics will pick up UTM information as well, so you'll have another source of info.

Hope this helps.

Charlie

Btw, Hubspot is all bark and no bite, but I may be biased 🙂
 

[Dan_Stevens_]

Charlie, by creating custom UTM fields for the lead record, woudn't those values get overwritten if/when the lead engages with another campaign in the future?

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

Yes, Dan, those are writable fields that should be set to null each time.

A better way to do this is have Most Recent and First Touch fields. You can skip having a third set of utm fields and just drop the data into the Most Recent fields, then have a central flow to move those values into First Touch if needed.

This would require you to field block the FT fields.

[Anonymous]

We do this and they do get overwritten when someone engages in another campaign. You can create an append field to historically track all of it, but that is about as far as we have gotten to fix this issue. We don't have this issue very much, but when we do, the append field helps a lot.

[Anonymous]

I just saw Josh's pop up. Josh, how did you set that up...do you have an article? This sounds like a great way to avoid the append field.

[Anonymous]

Dan, you're right.
Josh and Nicole's approaches are advanced methods that will work better to track everything, but I was just providing Christine a baseline to get started.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Nicole, you can probably just add a choice to the "Change data value" flow step (e.g., "if FT is not empty" set "most recent" to the new value - otherwise populate the FT field).  Or better yet. create two flow steps: one for "FT" and one for "MR".  That way you can always be sure there will be a value in the "MR" field, even if it's been the "FT".  And apply the necessary "choices" to ensure "FT" doesn't get overwritten if a value already exists.

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone, thanks for the info - since I'm very new to all this let me clarify with all of you nice wonderful helpful people:

1. Create UTM parameters in Google Analytics for each of my LPs
2. Set up fields in Marketo to capture UTM parameters
3. Create hidden field to auto capture
4. Some special sauce for more advanced tracking that I'm not going to worry abt this second

Thanks all!