Marketo and Google URL Builder/Campaigns

[Anonymous]

I'm in the process of becoming more acclimated with Marketo and one of the first things I'd like to address is the disconnect between our Google Analytics campaigns and Marketo. For certain ad campaigns and social media efforts we create custom URLs via Google's URL builder. When these visits are tracked in Marketo, they are shown as Google Search visits. Is there a way to make sure these show the proper referral source?

For some of these campaigns, we do direct traffic to a landing page with a custom form built for that campaign, however a lot of this traffic we need to send to a specific page within the site or the home page itself. Suggestions?

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

I take it you are able to track the traffic going to your landing pages, so the issue is specifically with traffic that goes to other pages first.  A partial solution will be to use a modified cookie to track the parameters from the URL.  This article is written specifically for Adwords but could apply here:
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L8SwCAK

Note this won't help with organic traffic, but it sounds like thats not your concern.

[Anonymous]

When you say that they are shown as "Google Search" visits, are you saying 

• The Original Search Engine field is "Google"?
• The Original Referrer field contains google.com? 
• You have a smart campaign that is setting this value in the Lead Source field of a new lead?  If so, what are the Choices in its Change Data Value flow action that set the Lead Source values?
• These leads are being added as members of a "Google Search" program?  If so, what are the triggers and filters in the smart campaign that is doing this?

We have a smart campaign that sets the Lead Source field value of new anonymous leads based on a series of Choices in its Change Data Value flow action.  We differentiate between Google paid search, natural search and  display network sources using the following Choices.

Choice 2: If 'Original Referrer' starts with 'http://googleads' then:

Attribute:  'Lead Source'

New Value: 'Online Ad (MKT)'

Choice 3: If 'Original Referrer' contains in 'sfid_r=70160000000Y04B', 'sfid_r=70160000000X3BD', 'sfid_r=70160000000Y3YZ'. then:

Attribute:  'Lead Source'

New Value: 'Online Ad (MKT)'

Choice 4: If 'Original Referrer' contains in 'medium=Online_Ad', 'medium=online_Ad'. then:

Attribute:  'Lead Source'

New Value: 'Online Ad (MKT)'

Choice 5: If 'Original Referrer' contains 'gclid=' then:

Attribute:  'Lead Source'

New Value: 'Paid Search (MKT)'

Choice 6: If 'Original Referrer' contains in 'sfid_r=70160000000WxNC', 'sfid_r=70160000000X3Ay', 'sfid_r=70160000000X3BI', 'sfid_r=70160000000WxNH', 'sfid_r=70160000000WxNM'. then:

Attribute:  'Lead Source'

New Value: 'Paid Search (MKT)'

We also have a Choice 11 that sets the value to "Natural Search (MKT)" if the lead is a member of the "Original Referrer - Natural Search" smart list, which has the following filters for Google among others for Bing and Yahoo:
"Original Search Engine is Google" and "Original Referrer contains google."

We also have separate programs for "Paid Search - Google", "Natural Search - Google", "Google Contextual Ad" and "Google Retargeting Ad".  Each of these has a smart campaign that updates the program progression status to "Responded" when the lead fills out a form on a specific landing page with a specific querystring parameter or if the form is on our website in an iframe, we read a cookie value with the current campaign ID into a hidden form field.  This is the technique that Steven described.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Steven and Elliott! These look like great suggestions. I will report back on what worked for us. Thanks again!

[Anonymous]

Still working on understanding Marketo so I can get to the point to follow the above accurately. Quick question in the meantime, when you set up an Adwords campaign and are setting the cost of the program, how do you account for the fact that spending can vary from one Adwords Campaign to another and one may not know the final spend until the end of the month? I greatly appreciate your help and patience as I ask some painfully noob questions 🙂 !

[Anonymous]

You can update the Program cost at any time, so the best choice would be to enter your adwords budget and then update before delivering final reports.  Also our clients generally create different programs for each Adwords Campaign, and place them all under the Adwords Channel tag, and this makes data entry actually quite fast.