Tracking Adwords Program Success on Existing Landing Page

[Anonymous]

Just getting started with our Adwords campaigns and have a quick question for those who are experts on the subject.

If we have an existing program for the content we'll be "re-using" in our adwords campaign, I suppose that we should create a separate program under the Google Adwords channel to be able to track the conversion/ROI for that tactic.

Should I just create a triggered campaign within the Adwords program to detect the form submission on the existing landing page? If so, what is the constraint added to ensure this lead came from Adwords?

Or, is there an easier/better solution? At this time we're not looking for detailed statistics about the adwords campaign, just to know that it is working. 

[Anonymous]

And now that I think of it, is using the content's original landing page going to incorrectly tag the lead's acquisition as being "CONTENT" channel vs. "GOOGLE ADWORDS" ? Hmm...maybe just easier to duplicate the page and use it exclusively for AdWords urls

[Anonymous]

We have a Marketo program to track new leads created from a referal from our Google Adwords.  This won't track responses from existing leads that have a different Original Referrer.  The program has 1 smart campaign to update the Paid Search channel's progression status to "Responded" and its smart list has a Fills Out Form trigger with the "Form Name is any" constraint,  a Member of Program filter with the "Member of Program - false" and "Program is Google Adwords" constraints and a Original Referrer "contains gclid=" filter .  All Adwords referrals have the gclid querystring parameter.  However, all Google ads have this querystring parameter, so if you are running a display ad campaign with Google, you'll need to include a unique querystring parameter on those links and add another filter to exclude them in this smart campaign.

[Anonymous]

It really depends on your strategy. If you want to track the costs of your Adwords programs apart from your content programs, then I would clone the program and change the tag.

 if you want to report on Adwords activity in the existing program, figure out a constraint to set on the filled out form trigger campaign (add a URL string to your URLs in AdWords or figure out if they have one already).

[Anonymous]

Elliott - that's the kind of setup that I think would work. How do you update the correct Adwords Program though, if you have multiple programs running?

Does your setup then properly set the acquisition program as the Adwords channel, or does it still take whatever the form's respective program is going to set?

[Anonymous]

We don't differentiate between our different Adwords campaigns now in part because we did not add any differentiating querystring parameter values when we first started and if we were to add the querystring parameter now, Google would consider that a new Ad and our stats would be reset.  We do include a differentiating querystring parameter on our display ads, which enables the appropriate Marketo programs to be triggered. 

We have a smart campaign in each Adwords program to set the Acquisition Program value to the Adwords program name, rather than attribute the acquision program to the resource / contact request associated with the form fill.

[Anonymous]

I've followed the instructions for creating custom fields such as Campaign Term, Campaign Source, Campaign ID, from the Marketo library, and have created hidden fields in my form to pull the data from the AdWords referral.

When I build out the URL it looks like this:

blahblah.html?leadsource=PPC&utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=PPC&utm_term={keyword}&utm_content={creative}

Google Adwords says this is an invalid URL and won't display my ads.

If I remove the "?leadsource=" portion it will allow the ad to work but the link itself will break and the user is sent to our home page backup.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong here?

[Anonymous]

Naor, AdWords actually uses the utm_xxx parameters itself with its own values, so you will need to use your own unique querystring parameters in the link you specify. 

Also, you cannot remove the "?" character between the base URL and the querystring parameters - that may be why the link is failing.

[Anonymous]

Naor -- that's strange that the link is breaking. Just confirming -- when you remove the leadsource portion, your URL looks like this:

blahblah.html?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=PPC&utm_term={keyword}&utm_content={creative}

There's more info on this topic in this article here: Linking a Google AdWords Ad to a Marketo Landing Page with a Form

[Anonymous]

Ei-Mang you are correct.

The problem is that the landing page's form has a hidden Lead Source field which is set to retrieve data from ?leadsource=

when this is not present in the referring url, the page sends the user to our home page.

Is that typical behavior?

The only way to solve this is to make the Lead Source field "use default value", but this is not a good workaround since I am collecting other data from social media etc. that change this field dynamically.