Person Source Program

[ckowalczyk]

Hi All,

Does anyone have a great program build they can share to capture Person Source?

I want to build out a centralized program but of course, I want to capture all avenues possible. Some of the potential challenges that I forsee:

• defining all marketing sources
• defining all outside sources, ie. sales
• defining the standardized versions of all sources for consistency
• capturing the correct UTM parameters properly and what to look out for
  • how to leverage:
    • Original Referrer
    • Original Search Engine
    • Original Search Phrase
    • Original Source Info (I suspect as a sub-field to Person Source)
    • Original Source Type (same as above)
• leveraging Acquisition Program and Acquisition Date

I think that would cover it? 

Any help is welcomed!

Cheers,

Chris

[Jroscoe]

Hi Chris - 

Hopefully, I can explain how I have it set up. 

• I leverage channels and status changes to control most of the person source allocation. Our channels align very closely with our marketing lead sources. We completed an overhaul of our lead sources, Marketo programs, Salesforce campaign types and Marketo Measure channels before kicking off the lead source automation project. 
• Thus, when a specific program and program status change happens, it triggers an operational flow using executable campaigns to assign the lead source based on the channel. 
• For UTM-based source allocation, I have a tracker outside of Marketo, that allows for standardizing of UTMs, so I can use the source/medium fields to allocate form fill activity to specific online channels.
• For sources outside of Marketing channels, they are typically coming from Salesforce and will have the value filled in when they enter Marketo from Salesforce. 
• For new records, I set the acquisition lead source through another set of workflows, and it isn't overwritten, but we update the current person source with each new marketing activity. 

Acquisition Program and Acquisition date are trickier and this is a good article to refer to Solved: How to capture the acquisition program with a trig... - Marketing Nation (marketo.com)

Based on how the person enters the database,

• I have some operational programs that assign acquisition (those that come from Salesforce)
• I put workflows to assign acquisition program in templates (for APIs and non-Marketo landing pages)
• For most other programs, it's managed through list import or form fill from a Marketo landing page 

[Katja_Keesom]

I would distinguish two different things and not mix them up:

1. Acquisition Program tracks when and how the person became known (you obtained the actual email address).
2. Person source is the very first interaction with your brand, so this is often when the person is still anonymous.

So when assessing Person Source, I would not look at acquisition program. I tend to leverage executable campaigns per Person Source and run them in a very specific order to ensure the most relevant channel is stamped (people often enough meet multiple criteria and you want to be precise in the combination of values to evaluate).

In my experience the Person Source does not get overwritten once stamped.