Original Referrer Value Question

[Hank_Hansen]

I want to confirm what happens with the Original Referrer value in the following scenario:

- An ad on a paid channel drives a new visitor to our site 

- The person chats with sales and the sales rep manually creates a lead in SFDC (we do not have Marketo/SFDC integration with chat at this time)
- A Marketo email is sent to the new lead 
- The lead clicks a link in the email which associates their munchkin cookie with their record, populating their Original Referrer value

What is the Original Referrer value at the time of the email click (time of cookie association). Will the Original Referrer be the paid channel that sent them to our site (presuming that was their first visit) or will it be more recent activity?

Is there a solution in Analytics that would show me all records that have a given paid channel in their referrer history? I haven't found such a report so far.

[Hank_Hansen]

I think I found the answer in this thread:

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Product-Discussions/Original-Referrer-What-s-it-really-for/td-p/82723

Sanford Whiteman stated:

"...the Original Referrer is the URL the lead came from when they were first created by Munchkin as an anonymous lead."

Based on this, it appears that value will not change. Now I need to confirm if traffic from Google paid ads will have a different value than traffic from Google organic search.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Right, I was about to point you there. 🙂

But relying on referrer data instead of on deliberate UTM tagging isn't going to give you enough granularity IMO.

[Hank_Hansen]

Thanks Sanford - Do know of any articles or threads that discuss the UTM tagging approach? I see the UTMs in the OR data and I can use a smart list to query contents of the OR (i.e. Original Referrer contains "GCLID" to identify leads from Google Ads, etc.). 

[Hank_Hansen]

I should have mentioned I already capture UTMs in hidden fields but I haven't taken that any further.

I'm reluctant to start using manual UTMs added to google's auto-tagging since I can rely on conversion reporting there, although I understand there are some benefits to tracking it in Marketo (discussed in Edward Unthank's post in this thread):
https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Product-Discussions/Adwords-auto-tagging-tracking-with-Marketo/m-p/210...