Pass UTM Parameters from from homepage of website to Marketo Landing Page

[Anonymous]

We want to be able to send some of our PPC ads to our homepage versus a Marketo landing page. We want to place UTM parameters on the link of the homepage so we can pass those values to a Marketo form once they land on a Marketo landing page.

Is anyone currently doing this and if so please share how you are capturing the data?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Marketo Forms can easily fill hidden fields from URL query params (?name1=value2&name2=value2) or from cookies.  (When you add a hidden field, you specify the source.)

If you're talking about organic traffic hitting http://landing.example.com (with no query params) at some point after a user visited http://www.vaneck.com/?utm_medium=somethingorother, then you'll need to save the `utm_medium` value into a cookie so that it can be picked up later by the form.

If you're talking about links on http://www.vaneck.com/?utm_medium=... going directly to a Marketo LP, then in theory you could just copy the utm_medium into the query string: http://pages.vaneck.com?utm_medium=.  But chances are you're not going to take users straight from one page to the other, so you would need a cookie to remember the value across pages on www.vaneck.com as well.  Once it's in a cookie, use a cookie as a source.

Edward Unthank​ has an expert's guide to lead source tracking that he'll probably post here if I give him a nudge.

[Edward_Unthank_]

(Here's a lead source guide Sanford was referring to: Marketo Lead Source Guide)

When you're pointing ads at your homepage (which I never do—make a landing page with more value for the user and which captures lead information with a specific call-to-action related to the query!), if your inbound link as UTM parameters, you'll want to store them in a cookie with some JavaScript. I haven't found a fool-proof, applicable-everywhere JS snippet free to the public, but I'm hoping to create that one day!

Also, any internal links (aka from your home page to another page on your site with the same parent domain and same GA tracking shippet) shouldn't have UTM parameters because that fudges Google Analytics visit data pretty badly. It gets treated as a new session improperly and skews numbers and visitor paths.

You would be able to get optimization reporting metrics in GA for aggregate/anonymized, because you'll be able to see conversions based on paid traffic sources in GA. That's assuming you have goals in GA set up, but that's easy enough—I just make all the landing pages for TOFU/MOFU conversion follow-up pages start with "thank-you-" and create a goal for that, and then set up a BOFU conversion follow-up page convention of "thanks-"

Edward Unthank | Founder, Etumos

[Anonymous]

Hi Kristen -

I was trying to achieve the same thing finally found a solution that worked for me.  I have provided the Javascript I used in this post: Solution to using UTM parameters & cookies to capture lead source information

Specifically, when setting cookies, include domain and path attributes.  Setting domain and path attributes allow cookies to be read across subdomains.  To have a cookie available to all subdomains, you must put a . in front of your domain in the domain attribute. Setting the path attribute as path=/ will have the cookie be available within the entire specified domain.

document.cookie = key + "=" + query[key] + ";domain=.yourdomain.com;path=/";

[Anonymous]

Here's the solution we devised: Capture URL parameters and use on links