Tracking beyond one source

[Suman_Sharma]

I believe that we wouldn’t be able to track a conversation from Marketo once the user bounced off the UTM tagged links from paid campaigns. May I check in if there is any way to properly attributed the responses to the respective traffic sources? 

GA4 tracking or google ads reports could be a solution, however I do not think it is good practice to accept two sources of truth (lets say: salesforce and google ads).

Issue	Example	Business Impact
Marketo unable to track responses (Marketo form submitted) through paid traffic sources beyond one click.	A great example, will be if I were to direct paid traffic to About Us pages, once the user head to contact us page to fill up the form the lead will not be attributed to paid ads and will be attributed to these 2 SFDC instead: Sales Inquiry - Campaign A General Inquiry - Campaign B	This measurement flaw will affect attribution and calculation of CPL ( cost per response) on paid ads. We will undervalue the responses .from paid search and this could potentially impact planning to attribute the right resource for digital efforts. As all acquire response more than one touch point will be affected.

Thanks,

Suman

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Broadly, there are 4 types of attribution tech you can use for this, ordered from simple/cheap to complex/expensive.

1. A JavaScript library for UTM persistence. This can be as simple as my UTM Forwarder, which tracks on the same origin using Local Storage, or other libs that use cookies, such as ConversionPath. There are tons of other li’l libraries in this space. They have different levels of customizability... and, to be frank, different levels of reliability. (Obviously you want one that does what it says, every time, as opposed to one that overpromises and creates irregular results.)
   
2. Server-side attribution implemented via a webhook-compatible service. These use the Marketo REST API to attribute conversions to previous web activities, even across devices. They can create Marketo Custom Objects, so you can view multiple conversions for the same person. The advantage here is you don’t need anything else running in the browser, as Munchkin is already doing the lifting.
3. Robust attribution apps like Marketo Measure (Bizible). These apps are Marketo forms-aware, though they have their own analytics JS. Results become touchpoint Custom Objects and allow (relatively) easy reporting. They’re not cheap to implement and have a learning curve, but can pay for themselves depending on the business.
4. Reporting out of a marketing data warehouse. Of course this has the prerequisite of importing Marketo Activity Log data on a regular basis, but the reporting possibilities are endless because you have the raw data. You’d pair this with a BI tool: PowerBI, Looker, Tableau, whatever.