Tracking lead source & organic search

[Anonymous]

Anybody have any tips or best practices for tracking lead source? I set up a series of smart campaigns to fill in the blanks, and I'm using "web page visited", but I found that my lead source gets overwritten when leads get merged together, so I still end up combing through them manually to decipher the true value.

I asked Marketo support but unfortunately they had no advice for me. 

Anybody here have any ideas? I had also been using the "referring URL" for a bit, but I had run into some other problems there.

How do you guys all set it up? 

Lastly - I have also noticed that since migrating from Pardot to Marketo that our recognized organic search source is significantly down. Would anyone know why this might be? We see a lot of direct traffic, people ending up on very specific pages of our site (hard to believe they'd get there without having searched for something), but without a referring URL like google.com - and out of Pardot we'd see hardly any of that. Anyone happen to know why there'd be such a discrepancy among the two services?

Thanks for your input!!



 

[Anonymous]

I don't know about the discrepancy, but what about adding leads to search programs (campaigns) to maintain multiple touches?

[Bruce_Jeffers]

@Rebekah H:
Quick question -- when you say "tracking lead source", do you mean attributing the very first touchpoint as the source of a lead? Or do you mean you want to keep track of all touchpoints and assets the lead engages with over time?

[Unfortunately I have no ideas about the second part of your question with the referrer discrepancy.]

[Anonymous]

I'm very interested in this as well. ...that is, I'm interested in better tracking of how visitors to our site are getting there.  We have UTM referrer code tracking in our forms, but if a visitor doesn't have this or visits a few pages before filling out the form, this doesn't help.  we have the original referrer and original search engine fields, but the data seems to be very spotty.

I don't understand all the mechanics, but I was hoping this is information that Marketo would capture as an anonymous visitor and then pass it along on form fill-out. 

Specifically, I'd like to know:

* Organic Search (and from which search engine),

* Direct, or

* Referred (and from where)

...and then...

* If Search, can we get search terms?

thanks,

Jeff

[Bruce_Jeffers]

"I don't understand all the mechanics, but I was hoping this is information that Marketo would capture as an anonymous visitor and then pass it along on form fill-out."

Jeff Day - In my experience the Marketo munchkin code does usually do this. Are you not seeing those results with your pages & activity logs? You can run some queries on this using the constraints in the Visited Web Page filter (see below):

You can also add "Is Anonymous = true" as another filter to show you only Anonymous leads (rather than Known).

If you don't see many results when running these queries, you may want to check that your Munchkin code is deployed on your site properly.

[SanfordWhiteman]

In my experience the Marketo munchkin code does usually do this.

Not reliably -- but the unreliability of Referrer and Search Query constraints is not Munchkin's fault.

In the Referrer case, if you are not running HTTPS on your LPs, you by definition will have spotty coverage, because SSL sites will not pass the referrer to you at all.

Even when it is present, you should also not expect the referrer to be unobfuscated (that is, to reflect the last URL the user knowingly visited before visiting you, rather than an interstitial page dedicated to stripping referrer info). Obtaining the Search Query is deliberately made difficult by modern search engines.

You can also add "Is Anonymous = true" as another filter to show you only Anonymous leads (rather than Known).

This filter is actually being removed in Munchkin 2.0, to be released Q1 2016.  You must remove it from all SLs.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Sanford.  This seems to match what we are seeing...very spotty data (actually, like 90% spotty.)  We only get clean data when we control the input--that is, when we can set up the UTM parameters for the referral (our controlled campaigns). 

Tracking organic traffic is our biggest gap.

[Anonymous]

Hi Rebekah and Jeff Day​ - have you looked at attribution tools in LaunchPoint? I'd recommend looking at Bizible to see whether they can automate this. You can see the search terms that originally brought them to the site, even if they came back a month or two later to fill out a form. Also, Brightfunnel, Full CircleCRM and others have solutions.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Tim.  We're looking at Bizible and FullCircle.  But I still have a question of whether those parameters (particularly organic and "not-our" referrals) are even being passed.  If they're not, Bizible won't be able to collect them either.

[Josh_Hill13]

Some sites are using internal referrer UTMs, so that's something to investigate to use for Marketo. Does Bizible handle that better? Kapost might.

Full Circle and Brightfunnel are more about program attribution so if you can't get the right Organic data, that won't help much.

Also, see some of what I've written on the internal ops of attribution inside Marketo itself - marketingrockstarguides.com