This is part one of a two part series on Pardot Marketing Attribution using UTM Parameters.

Why UTM Parameters in Pardot for Marketing Attribution

This article series is about Salesforce Pardot attribution using UTM parameters.  We’ll first discuss closing the loop between the marketing to sales cycle, not in terms of customer outreach or a buying journey, but in terms of hard data, and truly understanding Return on Investment (ROI).  And then we’ll talk about how UTM parameters are the link between top of funnel and the deal, and Pardot forms, landing pages and other digital assets can be configured to capture UTM parameters and align analytics tools and tagging strategies with Pardot marketing automation.

“The digital landscape is more crowded than ever, and the customer journey has become more complex“

Digital Engagement: A Complex Journey

So when we talk about Pardot, we typically think “Email”, as Pardot is functionally largely an email marketing automation tool.  However, as a consumer I can’t remember the last time I ever bought a product or acquired services just because of an email.  And I think this goes for every different other channel as well.  I might look at email, but then I’ll read a review… Buyers might conduct a google search and end up on a vendor’s website, or maybe fill out a form on a social media profile.

As a marketer, I’ve been working with multi-channel marketing strategies, marketing infrastructure and media buying for most of my career, and the sheer number digital top of funnels channels have grown to be ever more complex as well. Most mature companies will use a mix of Google Ads, SEO driven organic traffic, and email newsletter campaigns. Traditional advertising has exploded into texting, into conversational marketing and chatbots, to more complex social media marketing, or serving dynamic or programmatic ads across any new number of sites… 

And while multi-channel strategies have become easier to implement and manage with cross-platform and integration tools, there is often ton of confusion as to where leads actually came from after deals ultimately close.

“There’s still a lack of understanding exactly what a lead is, and marketing often pushes off attribution as a sort of IT task.”  

Sales and Marketing work from different data sets

Marketers start at the top of the funnel, and push to establish KPIs as far down as possible, but quite often that isn’t too deep, and we often lose granularity as soon as leads are pushed into a CRM.  As a marketer, throughout most of my career I’ve patched together multiple different analytics softwares, from GA for website traffic to GAds and FB Ads Manager for Ads, to Search Console + Moz for Organic analysis, to CrazyEgg and Optimizely for UX, and marketers often then try to push all of this into yet another business intelligence (BI) tool, like Google Data Studio or Tableau to make sense of this information, trying to look down the funnel.

Digital Marketers traffic in “goals”, “website conversions” and “leads”

Salespeople however- they look at customers from the opposite perspective. Sales managers, Rev Ops and executives typically start at a closed deal and work their way from the bottom up, attempting to establish methods or patterns by reverse-engineering successful sales cycles. They care about ROI, but the further up in the funnel they look, the murkier that picture becomes.  How do we measure the impact of user experience or a facebook post on a particular sale?

Salespeople and executives deal in touchpoints with customers 

Fundamentally, the data that’s captured by digital marketers, and the KPI’s we use to measure digital marketing campaign performance all too often DOES NOT MAKE it into the CRM.  The website where a prospect originated, the digital ad campaign, the channel, even the keyword gets discarded as soon as a lead is “captured” and stored in Pardot / Salesforce. Now there’s a reason for that, and we could spend another hour talking about privacy and where things are going with cookies and consent, but for the purposes of this discussion, the information gets lost.

There are a couple big issues… I see a lot of firms either rely on a manual process to to assign the source, either a salesperson filling this out- or often a “How did you hear about us” dropdown on a website… which I’m flabbergasted when I see CMO’s make marketing strategy decisions on inaccurate data (b/c imo buyers or liars).  

OR, the other challenge is that attribution is done in Salesforce for one specific channel. For example, a number of event or webinar tools have great attribution tools that work with Salesforce campaigns.  Similarly, there is a way to pass a variable along with destination urls for Google Adwords called the gclid or “Google click identifier”, but it only works for that specific Google Ads source.  Some companies I work with use Zapier for integrations (like Facebook lead forms for example), which works great (and is an awesome Pardot tool btw).  

BUT, in each of these three examples we’re kind of hacking the system to build attribution for one specific source, and there’s no way to measure the whole funnel. As soon as we try to start measure things side by side, we’re comparing apples to oranges to empty buckets where fruit should be… Ultimately the biggest problem is there is no standardization between channels.

Salesforce was not built as a Marketing tool

“There has long been a disconnect between Analytics and CRM Platforms“

Attribution has long been a manual or channel-specific exercise 

• Lead Source is often filled out manually by Sales, not automatically a function of a marketing initiative
• Native integrations are channel specific (such as many event management platforms) or nonexistent
  • For example, the Google Ads integration was retired in 2013! 
  • Instead, there is a platform-specific method of importing “gclid” parameters into Salesforce
• Salesforce Campaigns membership for multichannel is marketing is challenging

If you’re an old school digital marketer, a lot of this will be old hat, but I want to introduce you to UTM codes, which create a thread from lead generation and sew the fabric of attribution all the way to the deal, closing the loop in our marketing > sales cycle.  

UTMa are NOT a new technology; but in thinking of a martech stack, we have lead generation platforms, we have we CRM and our analytics stack, and it’s essential that they’re all working off of the same information.  

Close the loop in your customer journey lifecycle

UTM parameters connect the dots by passing marketing information, (almost like “marketing metadata”) along with a website conversion, to a prospect in Pardot, to a lead, to a contact, and a won opportunity in Salesforce, fundamentally allowing full visibility into the funnel from the top down, to the bottom up, and true alignment between marketing and sales/executive management. 

Used by Markers to track the effectiveness of digital advertising campaigns

Introduced by Google Analytics predecessor “Urchin” Analytics

• Parameters identify:
  • Referring campaign
  • Attributes to the website session until the window expires
•  Parameters may be parsed by analytics tools to populate reports

Elements of an Urchin Tracking Code Parameter

So now I want to talk about what goes into a UTM code, and again, fundamentally we’re talking about creating a URL with bits of text appended to the end to pass information onto our website.  

After we identify the destination url where we’re sending visitors, the first thing we want to think about is a taxonomy of naming conventions, as UTMs will be very valuable for reporting, but will also get totally out of control if we’re not organized.  

We’ll want to familiarize ourselves with what available parameters there actually are, beginning with the source.  This is typically the website sending traffic, but we’re writing these variables, so we can really define anything we want.  If we look at large volume ad networks, we’ll see this information hashed for privacy, which is then humanized on the other end. 

A campaign is typically the digital initiative we’re running, but this is going to very important if we want to align with our Pardot folder structure and Salesforce campaign *(especially if we’re using Connected Campaigns), but we’ll talk a little more about that later. 

Mediums are channel groupings of major buckets of media.  And content and term aren’t really used that much, unless we’re running a lot of digital media, and as Google has their own way of tracking keywords.

Campaigns Naming Conventions

I’ve had a lot of success aligning utm campaigns with Pardot folders and Salesforce Campaigns, and I typically advise that campaigns are named to be sortable, reportable and to descriptively indicate the purpose and details of a campaign.  

And by descriptive, we can keep it simple, but I prefer to have as much information in a campaign, identifying first the launch date, the brand or service being marketing, the platform or ad type, the goal of the campaign, who is the target audience, all so if I see that campaign name later, I know exactly to which campaign it refers.    

Reportable

• Use unique search strings wherever possible

Sortable

• Set standards for order, use of punctuation and case tense

Descriptive of Initiative

• The date, targeting and intent should be apparent or a least decipherable from the name of a campaign

Resources for creating URLS

We can learn to code a utm link pretty easily, but there are a couple of free, widely used tools out there for coding UTMS.  Google and Raven Tools (another analytics platform) use UTM Builders that we can use to just plug in values and spit out a code that we can put as our destination url, plug into bitly, or use in a custom redirect on a 3rd party link.

https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

https://raventools.com/marketing-reports/google-analytics/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/express-utm-builder/flockfgmfgmpmimlfkkeepkblckodbjg?hl=en

Attribution Solutions

Now… not every company has this issue; and there are a number of platforms that sort-of solve for this disconnect, but there’s still no guarantee that any of these will 100% standardize all marketing attribution without an underlying UTM solution. 

Datorama is in my opinion the coolest recent Salesforce Acquisitions, which comes with preconfigured connectors to most major marketing outlets, allowing we to pump data and elements of attribution from all sorts of marketing platforms into a single place to visualize and analyze.  

Google Analytics 360 offers a native integration with Marketing Cloud (though not currently Pardot), which sounds pretty cool, though I’ve heard the data types don’t always line up.  The integration is also free, but like Datorama, it’s far from cheap.  

There are also some pretty cool AppExchange products out there, like this platform called gaconnector, which creates its own cookie (based on the old Urchin Script), that captures UTMs and a whole bunch of other user data, but with GDPR, CCPA and all sorts of new browser restrictions, I’d be hesitant to become reliant on a smaller platform. 

And lastly, if we have significant development resources, we can invest in coding we own first party cookie to basically do the same thing.  Instead of Google or Pardot dropping a cookie, we can hypothetically create we own first-party cookie..  

But none of those are why we are reading this post; we’re going to talk about how to use Pardot to capture UTM values and pass them into Salesforce. 

Next up, read How to implement UTM Parameter capture in Pardot.