UTM Tracking for Ungated Assets

[AshleighMo]

Hi experts! 

Looking to see what others are doing/collaborate on a solution for ungated asset UTM tracking. We have ungated assets and would like to stamp the UTM value for all assets. The gated assets were easy to set up. We have a global asset download form with hidden fields that will pull in those parameters. Is there a similar/easy way to do the same with ungated assets? Since they do not have a form, I can't just use hidden fields. I have seen some information on potentially using some automation to submit a hidden form for ungated assets but don't have the best grasp on the developer side of things. 

How can we pull in the utm values without a form? 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Are you trying to persist the UTM values in browser storage so you can later put them on a form? Or post the UTM values to Marketo immediately?

The latter obviously only works if there’s a record in Marketo.You can create a form that has no fields, just a button, and have the follow-up URL be the asset URL. (From the end user’s standpoint, there won’t be a form.) If the Munchkin session was not already associated with a known person, it’ll create a new lead with a blank email address (but with all the UTM fields filled in). Later, you can set the lead’s email address when you know it.

[AshleighMo]

Post the values to marketo immediately. Ideally stamping the values to the equivalent lead record field "utm_source" 
"utm_campaign". I came up with a workaround for source and medium but only because there is only 1 acceptable value per channel; ex.) Email. Vs. Campaign where it is a unique campaign name for everything. 

Thanks for the response Sanford!

Ideally, the team wants to pull reports to see engagements by channel (although they should be able to do this in analytics), I think certain users do not have access to both. 

For the form idea, would you just have a lead facing button on a marketo LP that would be something like "View Blog Now" and then it would redirect them to the AEM site blog itself? I saw something about using scripting to have a hidden form auto submit the button so that the lead had no additional action but I'm not sure how to accomplish that. What are your thoughts?

[SanfordWhiteman]

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For the form idea, would you just have a lead facing button on a marketo LP that would be something like "View Blog Now" and then it would redirect them to the AEM site blog itself? I saw something about using scripting to have a hidden form auto submit the button so that the lead had no additional action but I'm not sure how to accomplish that. What are your thoughts?

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You never want to submit the form without user interaction. That just means mail scanners will inflate your stats and make them even more misleading!

Just have a form that‘s one big button, nothing else. This is a very familiar experience on the modern web.

[Darshil_Shah1]

I like both the ideas Sanford suggested, and we usually go with one or the other for our customers based on their requirements (and the one they feel okay with). For the former method of storing the UTMs in the cookies and using those for filling out the hidden attribution fields on the form when the user fills it out later without any UTMs in the URL, you can also use the tactic as one of the parameters to store the offer/content that was previously accessed/viewed by the user. That way, you'd know how many users engaged with which non-gated content offer before engaging with the gated content offer.