If your marketing campaigns are bringing in leads, but you don’t know which campaign or channel the leads came from, is your campaign a success?
The most successful marketing and sales campaigns are the ones you can track. The more you track, the more you can repeat (or retool when you want to improve campaigns results!). When you know where the quality leads are coming from, you can be smarter about where your marketing department allocates time and money to continue to bring in revenue.
Tracking your lead sources in Marketo is a simple 2-step process, but it starts with understanding URL parameters.
A URL parameter is a tag you place in your landing page link for tracking purposes. You can spot URL parameters easily, because they come after the ? in any URL. For example:
The first part is the actual URL used to navigate to the website. The second part (in orange) is a query string that contains the URL parameter. It won’t change the destination of the URL at all, but it will pass data along so you can track if someone is visiting your landing page from a specific source or campaign that you define. When someone clicks the link above, we know that they visited our homepage from one of our blog posts.
To track various campaign data associated to your landing pages, you can add as many parameters as you need. With the example above, we could add another parameter after the Source, like “SourceDetail=Blog8” to track exactly which blog post the link click originated from.
Many of our clients will use URL parameters to track the effect of different sources for a particular campaign. For example, if you share a new white paper to Twitter, LinkedIn and in an email campaign, you can create different links with specific URL parameters (?Source=Twitter, ?Source=LinkedIn, and ?Source=Email) so that when someone downloads that white paper, the source is automatically collected and you can report on which sources are furthering your marketing efforts.
Now that you know what URL Parameters are, here’s how to set up your parameter tracking in Marketo.
Step 1 – Add the URL Parameter as a hidden field to your form.
When you create a form for your marketing campaign, you want to make sure to add a hidden field for the URL Parameter.
If your URL parameter is Product Interest, like in the Marketo example below, you would add a “Product Interest” field and set the field type to hidden. Then, in order to make sure the data will pass through the link, you have to set the autofill behavior option to “URL Parameter”. Make sure to name the parameter for the field you are tracking (ie Product Interest; Source; Campaign).
For step by step instructions to create a hidden field in your form, check out the Marketo Docs article here.
Step 2 – Create Landing Page links with URL Parameters
After your form is created with a hidden field for the URL parameter category you’d like to track, you need to actually create the different links with various parameters.
Once you’ve created your landing page, go into URL Builder (under the URL Tools menu option). Enter one of the parameters you’d like to track and click “update URL”. Marketo will automatically update the landing page link for that parameter, which you can then copy and paste. For example, if you enter “Twitter” in the field to track leads coming in from Twitter, the URL will update with ?Source=Twitter at the end. You can use that link for all your Twitter posts for that specific marketing campaign and later track how many leads were sourced from that channel.
For step by step instructions on creating landing page links with URL parameters, visit the Marketo Docs article here.
Tracking your campaign lead sources takes a little setup at the beginning, but once you get into a rhythm of creating your lead and campaign sources for every marketing campaign, you’ll soon be collecting all the data you need to make smart, marketing decisions that help you reach your sales targets.
Need help tracking lead sources or just looking to get more insight into your Marketo campaigns? Contact us and we can help!