Let’s paint a picture here, you spend a huge amount of your advertising budget a month on online ads, which seems to be driving a large amount of traffic to your page – however, you have no real visibility of the source of these leads or tracking specific details where multiple visitors land on the same web page but come from different referrers. This is where UTM fields in Marketo come to play.

Here’s a quick 101 on how to best track attribution from UTM fields in Marketo.

Step 1:

Login to Marketo and create custom fields (field type – string) for all the UTM’s you want to track to allow for the data to feed into Marketo when a lead converts on a form. The most common scenarios for UTM use are Campaign, Content, Medium, Source and Term – see definitions below.

utm_source = The referrer: (e.g. google, newsletter)
utm_medium = Marketing medium: (e.g. cpc, banner, email)
utm_campaign = Product, promo code, or slogan (e.g. spring_sale)
utm_term = Identify the paid keywords
utm_content = use to differentiate ads

Step 2:

Add the UTM fields to your form, remembering that these fields must be hidden!

A common issue with capturing the UTM values from the URL parameter is that the parameter must be in the URL during the time of form submission. This makes it tricky for the UTM value to be captured if a user navigates away and the parameters disappear.

To solve this issue, you can create a tracking script that will store any UTM parameter it finds into a cookie. So, if UTM parameters are present, this script will store these into a cookie – meaning if it comes from a URL and it is the first time seeing it, the script creates the cookie.

Step 3:

Set-up smart campaigns which trigger on the form filled out but is filtered by the specific UTM value.

This can be tested by creating URLs to your landing page and submitting the form with your test lead; check the UTM field values against your test lead to see it has populated properly.

Use the data in the fields to run reports to have clear visibility of the success of your campaigns.

Thanks!

Ghoncheh Taba