Lead Source as Hidden Field

[Anonymous]

Our team is trying to identify which social pages leads click through to fill out a form.  Our understanding is that we can put the lead source field as a hidden field in the form and identify which social site to populate in the URL. 

For example: www.domain.com/landingpageURL.html?source=linkedin

Will this work, even if it's not a .com URL?  Other examples have shown it with a .com at the end.

We just wanted to be absolutely sure.

Thank you!

[Josh_Hill13]

yes, this works with ANY URL

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much, Josh!

[Josh_Hill13]

Also, you may want to check out some tips on this:

https://community.spiceworks.com/blogs/marketing/1828-are-you-measuring-the-right-things

Marketing Attribution Setup ChecklistMarketing Rockstar Guides

Marketo Form Best PracticesMarketing Rockstar Guides

etumos.com has a good guide on this too.

[Edward_Unthank_]

Thanks, Josh!

Here's the link to our Guide to Marketo Lead Sourcing: Marketo Lead Source Guide

I generally like to store UTM parameters within those hidden fields and then use the UTM parameters to calculate Lead Source fields. I've run into too many occurrences of "Lead Source" being forgotten and unused over time when it's just a straight-up hidden field from URL parameters. Having a UTM Framework has the benefits of showing up in Google Analytics and then stored into lead fields in Marketo—this way, you get the aggregate and anonymized from Google Analytics for optimizing, AND you get the person and PII attached to revenue from Marketo/SFDC.

Cheers,
Edward Unthank | Founder, Etumos

[Anonymous]

Josh and Edward - thank you both for your input.  I have a second question about this topic. 

We are using the same form on a landing page but leads can get to the form from three different "contact us" links on our website.  We are wanting to populate their lead record with the lead source as a hidden field.  The lead source would be named against the product page that the lead was referred from, how does this work?

I'm confused about the URL Parameter and required Parameter Name, would that just be "source" or the name of the field we want to map the info back to?

Thank you for your help!

Christine

[SanfordWhiteman]

The Parameter Name is the name part of the name=value pair in the URL.

In

     https://www.example.com/?showform&source=page1&date=today

source and date are both Parameter Names. 

[Anonymous]

Very awesome Mr. Unthank. I'm becoming a big fan of yours.