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    The Sticky Cookie

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    juliana
    This document discusses integrating Google Analytics source data with Marketo to track marketing campaign performance. It describes how Google Analytics tracks source and medium data but no longer stores it in a cookie. The solution involves using a JavaScript to mimic the classic Google Analytics cookie, extracting the source data, and passing it to hidden fields in Marketo forms. This allows tracking sources like paid campaigns throughout the customer journey from lead to opportunity in CRM systems like Salesforce.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    The Sticky Cookie

    Uploaded by

    juliana
    126 views6 pages
    This document discusses integrating Google Analytics source data with Marketo to track marketing campaign performance. It describes how Google Analytics tracks source and medium data but no longer stores it in a cookie. The solution involves using a JavaScript to mimic the classic Google Analytics cookie, extracting the source data, and passing it to hidden fields in Marketo forms. This allows tracking sources like paid campaigns throughout the customer journey from lead to opportunity in CRM systems like Salesforce.

    Original Description:

    How to Integrate Google Analytics Source Data With Marketo

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    This document discusses integrating Google Analytics source data with Marketo to track marketing campaign performance. It describes how Google Analytics tracks source and medium data but no longer stores it in a cookie. The solution involves using a JavaScript to mimic the classic Google Analytics cookie, extracting the source data, and passing it to hidden fields in Marketo forms. This allows tracking sources like paid campaigns throughout the customer journey from lead to opportunity in CRM systems like Salesforce.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    126 views6 pages

    The Sticky Cookie

    Uploaded by

    juliana
    This document discusses integrating Google Analytics source data with Marketo to track marketing campaign performance. It describes how Google Analytics tracks source and medium data but no longer stores it in a cookie. The solution involves using a JavaScript to mimic the classic Google Analytics cookie, extracting the source data, and passing it to hidden fields in Marketo forms. This allows tracking sources like paid campaigns throughout the customer journey from lead to opportunity in CRM systems like Salesforce.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 6

    The Sticky Cookie: How to Integrate Google

    Analytics Source Data with Marketo


    Today’s buyers conduct most of their research online, making it critical that you’re able to
    understand how people are finding your website and how your content is performing. Without
    these insights, it’s a bit like throwing a dart with blindfolds on. To be successful in this
    buyer-empowered world, you need to have full visibility into your customer's’ engagement with
    your website so you can identify what’s working well and what isn’t.

    Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for gaining these types of insights. Every time an
    anonymous visitor goes to your website, Google Analytics automatically detects the specific
    source that led them there—whether that be Google search, Facebook, or a referral from an
    online industry publication. These sources are also automatically grouped into broader
    marketing channels, called Mediums, which often include organic, cpc, social, referral, email,
    and direct.

    In order to associate traffic with paid campaigns, Google allows you to add parameters to a URL
    that identify important reporting data about your campaign like the site where the ad appeared,
    the campaign name, ad creative, and the search term that was targeted. These are often
    referred to as “UTM tags”, and typically look something like this:

    http://yourdomain.com/?utm_source=adsite&utm_campaign=adcampaign&utm_term=adkeywor
    d

    How Marketo Captures This Data


    Marketo, a popular marketing automation platform, allows you to create forms that will
    automatically capture ​UTM parameter values​, store them in hidden fields, and then submit them
    to a CRM like Salesforce. When implemented properly, this integration can allow you to close
    the loop from visit to lead to customer, and determine the true ROI of your ad campaign.

    Unfortunately, this only works if the tagged URL is also the page where the form is placed. If the
    conversion funnel requires that the user navigate to multiple URLs, the values of the UTM tags
    that were used on the landing page will not automatically persist throughout the visit.

    It also doesn’t account for the vast majority of traffic to your site coming from non-paid channels
    like organic search, referrals, and direct visits.
    This is where an integration with Google Analytics becomes critical. Since Google Analytics is
    already capturing this data, it should be pretty straightforward to take that data and pass it over
    to Marketo and Salesforce, right? Wrong. Unfortunately it’s not so easy.

    The Challenge: Google Analytics no longer stores this data in a


    local cookie
    In the classic version of Google Analytics, traffic acquisition data like source, medium, campaign
    content, and keyword were stored in a local cookie called _utmz, set by the classic ga.js
    tracking code.

    Do a quick Google search and you’ll find tons of scripts that were designed to extract the values
    from the cookie and pass them into hidden form fields. For a while, this solved the problem.

    Unfortunately these scripts no longer work because with the new version of Google Analytics,
    called Universal Analytics, all tracking happens at the server-side and the cookie set by the new
    analytics.js contains no information about the user's traffic sources.

    Technically, the classic Google Analytics tracking script still works, so you could simply place
    the old version on your site until Google no longer supports it.

    Since this isn’t a good permanent solution, we chose to go with the script e-nor created, which
    mimics the classic Google Analytics cookie and can be found ​here​. With the tracking script
    problem resolved, we can now focus our efforts on extracting that data from the cookie and
    passing them to hidden fields in a Marketo form.

    The Solution: Make UTM Values Sticky, And Then Store Them In
    Hidden Marketo Fields

    If you follow the steps below you’ll be able to capture a lead’s referring campaign, source,
    medium, ad content, and keyword and carry those values all the way through the sales funnel,
    from initial form submission to won opportunity. To do this, we’ll start at the end and work
    backwards. Note: We are limiting the scope of some of these tags just to run on certain sites so
    we don’t change everyone’s Salesforce and Marketo reports at once, but eventually we will roll it
    out to all Northeastern sites and won’t need to limit the scope anymore.

    1. Create Custom Fields in Salesforce


    You’ll need to create at least 5 custom fields in your CRM where the traffic source data will be
    stored. If using Salesforce, you may want to create these on both your Lead and Contact
    objects so the values can carry over when a lead is converted to a contact.
    ● GA_Medium__c_account: This will store the medium set by Google Analytics
    ● GA_Source__c_account
    ● GA_Campaign__c_account
    ● GA_Term__c_account
    ● GA_Content__c_account

    2. Add the Same Custom Fields to Marketo Forms


    Add the same fields created in the previous step to all forms you wish to integrate with Google
    Analytics. Since these should not be visible to the user, be sure to mark them as hidden.

    3. Deploy the Clone Classic Google Analytics Cookie


    Download a copy of e-nor’s ​javascript​ to mimic the Classic Google Analytics tracking script
    cookie behavior. This will be customized in the next step. You can find ​Northeastern’s copy
    here​. If you’re adding tracking to a subdomain or subdirectory of northeastern.edu then you
    don’t need to update the code. You only need to update it if you’re tracking a separate domain
    name (step 4).

    4. Modify The Javascript to Work With Your Domain


    Open the script you just downloaded in your favorite editor, and modify the line that looks like:
    var domains = ["mydomain1.com", "mydomain2.com"]; Change mydomain to any top-level
    domains that this script will be deployed on. This allows you to implement cross-domain
    browsing so session data will persist across multiple top-level domains.

    5. Download the Marketo Form Listener


    Many thanks to Keith W. Shaw for this ​awesome script​ that allows you to easily detect Marketo
    forms in Google Tag Manager. You’ll need this for the next few steps to work.

    6. Deploy Scripts Through Google Tag Manager


    Deploy both the Cloned Classic Google Analytics Cookie script and the Marketo Form Listener
    script through Google Tag Manager on any page of your website you wish to include with this
    solution. In most cases this should be all of the same pages you’re tracking with Google
    Analytics. Marketo Form Listener is already deployed across all our pages.

    7. Download and Deploy Our Extraction Script


    This is the magic bullet that extracts the traffic source data stored in our fake Google Analytics
    cookie, and then passes those values to hidden Marketo forms, allowing us to pass that data
    along with the lead throughout their journey in our CRM. You can find the ​Northeastern copy
    here​.

    <script>
    /*
    * To populate mkto form fields from cookie
    */
    function fillAllFormVals(){
    var z = _uGC(document.cookie, "__utmz=", ";"),
    source = _uGC(z, "utmcsr=", "|"),
    medium = _uGC(z, "utmcmd=", "|"),
    term = _uGC(z, "utmctr=", "|"),
    content = _uGC(z, "utmcct=", "|"),
    campaign = _uGC(z, "utmccn=", "|"),
    gclid = _uGC(z, "utmgclid=", "|"),
    allForms = MktoForms2.allForms();

    if (gclid !="-") {
    source = "google";
    medium = "cpc";
    }

    var passedVals = {
    "GA_Medium__c_account":medium,
    "GA_Source__c_account":source,
    "GA_Campaign__c_account":campaign,
    "GA_Term__c_account":term,
    "GA_Content__c_account":content,
    "LeadSource":medium,
    "Lead_Source_Detail__pc":source
    }

    for (i = 0; i < allForms.length; i++){


    var form = allForms[i];
    form.setValues(passedVals);
    }
    }

    function _uGC(l,n,s){
    if (!l || l=="" || !n || n=="" || !s || s=="") return "-";

    var i,i2,i3,c="-";
    i=l.indexOf(n);
    i3=n.indexOf("=")+1;

    if (i > -1) {
    i2=l.indexOf(s,i); if (i2 < 0){ i2=l.length; }
    c=l.substring((i+i3),i2);
    }
    return c;
    }

    (function(){
    fillAllFormVals();
    }());
    </script>

    If you chose to use different labels for your custom fields, you’ll want to modify the field labels
    referenced in the script to match your own.

    Since Marketo forms aren’t populated until after the page has fully loaded, you’ll want to
    leverage a custom event triggered by the Marketo Form Listener to trigger this tag. For your
    firing trigger, create a Custom Event called mkto.form.ready.

    8. Run Some Tests


    As a rule of thumb, you should always test any code deployments locally in your browser using
    Google Tag Manager’s Preview and Debug feature. While in debug mode, you can verify that
    the values are being set by exploring the source code or using an extension like ​Hidden Form
    Finder​.

    If you’ve implemented everything correctly and you’re using the Hidden Form Finder extension,
    you should see hidden field values that look something like this:

    9. Publish and Monitor


    Now that you have a working solution that you’ve tested and validated, it’s time to unleash it into
    the wild. Be sure to go back and check the results of your data after a few days or weeks to be
    sure that you’re getting the results you expected, and then revise accordingly.
    Enjoy Closed Loop Reporting!
    With this solution you’ll be able to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing efforts like never
    before. Good luck and be sure to share your results, comments, questions and suggestions for
    improvements in the comments.

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