UTM values transfer from content download to Marketo

[sparashar]

Hello guys-

We sent out an email with a link for content download to prospects. However, the utm parameters did not get transferred to our Salesforce instance. The link for download had utm values in it. What we are trying to understand is how do these utm parameters get captured in Marketo in this case and subsequently passed to the CRM.

[Darshil_Shah1]

 Are you able to see the UTMs captured in your fields in Marketo at least? To give some idea, UTMs aren't written to lead fields on its own. E.g., for form submissions, most users leverage the OOTB autofill capability to write the parameter values to the respective hidden fields on the form (Read more about it here on this product doc). If you want this data in SFDC, you'd have to have these fields mapped with the SFDC fields or have these fields synced to Marketo as unmapped SFDC fields. Apart from that, for non-form fill interactions, users can create a campaign set up to write data to fields by using the Query Parameter constraints as well.

[sparashar]

Unfortunately, it is not a form this is an email with a download button for a whitepaper.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Unfortunately, it is not a form this is an email with a download button for a whitepaper.

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That is unfortunate because it means

(a) You’ll be inflating the apparent “downloads” because mail scanners will register clicks on those links.

(b) Even if you pretend the clicks are all humans, within Marketo you’d only see the entire link as the {{trigger.link}} token. You won’t get the individual query params unless you pass the token to a webhook and parse out the individual params into lead fields.

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Gotcha! You have limited options then for capturing QPs at least that doesn't involve using a webhook service: you can create campaigns to write the respective UTMs to a lead field based on what value you have in the Clicked Link in Email activity's Link constraint (UTMs added to the link are included in the Link constraint). However, as you can probably imagine, this is not as scalable as the webhook solution is.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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What we are trying to understand is how do these utm parameters get captured in Marketo in this case and subsequently passed to the CRM.

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Expanding on Darshil’s answer, there is no automated, always-on mechanism to transfer query parameters (incl. utm_) params into Marketo fields.

You have to set that up. It’s easy, but it’s not enabled by default.

The most common method is to use the Hidden field Autofill feature on Marketo forms, although more advanced methods offer more flexibility.

Once the fields are written in Marketo, they can be synced to SFDC using the standard SFDC ↔︎ Marketo sync (if they’re Person-level fields) or the SFDC Campaign Member ↔︎ Marketo Program Member sync (if they’re Program-level fields).

[sparashar]

Thank you so much!