List Purchase - Attribution

[Kristy_Murphy]

Best Practice Ideas Requested

Situation

We have an agency partner that purchases lists for us. They then blast on those lists via the list broker from their platform. e.g We buy a list from BestListInc and they blast the e-mail from their platform.

Issue

The e-mail is coming from the list broker because we don't want to load & blast list purchased contacts into our Marketo instance. That said, because the e-mail is not coming from our Marketo instance and our CTA is directing to our .com site - we are challenged to attribute the prospect to the specific list purchase.

We are wondering if we should change the CTA to a Marketo hosted landing page with a contact us form and applicable offers/promos/info. Does this help us get the attribution that we desire? If the landing page was specific to that program?

If we continue to direct to our website and the customer clicked from the e-mail sent from the list broker - with Munchkin code on it and then eventually fill out a contact us form what are the recommendations to get back to the "where did they come from"?

All ideas/suggestions welcomed.

Kristy

[Andy_Caron3 · Accepted solution]

Hi Kristy,

This is a tricky situation based on the way you are running these campaigns. IF you direct them to a page, Marketo or otherwise, and they fill out a form there is definitely a way to get that attribution. BUT, if your CTA does not send them to a form, then without an attribution platform (e.g. C3 Metrics, Bizible, etc.) it's hard to connect the dots between an entry point and a later conversion.

If you can follow scenario one, and point them to a form right away, then the simple use of UTM codes on the link you provide for BestListInc to use, and some hidden UTM fields the grab the parameters out of the ULR string should give you exactly that.

Then you want to make sure you have a program set up as the acquisition program in Marketo with a proper matching channel and program statuses to track the form completes that came from this effort.

If you have GA set up correctly you should be able to see how many unique visitors come in off the ads, and from the calculate your conversion rates and cost per click VS your Marketo calculcated CPL on form conversions. Marketo will track the acquisition program as a first touch and provide ROI for your spend vs Opportunities in RCA/RCE if you are using program costs correctly.

Hope this helps. Happy to provide more in-depth details if needed on any of these elements.

[Kristy_Murphy]

This I do believe will address our issue right now.

"If you can follow scenario one, and point them to a form right away, then the simple use of UTM codes on the link you provide for BestListInc to use, and some hidden UTM fields the grab the parameters out of the ULR string should give you exactly that.

Then you want to make sure you have a program set up as the acquisition program in Marketo with a proper matching channel and program statuses to track the form completes that came from this effort."

We have many domains and use SC and GA but it's not centralized as much as we'd like so I think that will be an "ideal state" for us.

Kristy

[SanfordWhiteman]

Check my post on click tracking for non-Marketo sends: http://blog.teknkl.com/tracking-clicks-non-marketo-emails/

[Kristy_Murphy]

This was incredibly helpful! Thank you!