Generating Custom URLs in Marketo

I'd be curious to hear about this as well.....

The URL Builder is what was being referred to in the presetnation.  Currently Marketo doesn't have the ability to create short URLs for your landing pages like bit.ly.  Within Marketo, the only way to differentiate different CTAs / placement to the same URL is to capture query string parameters identifying the CTA / placement into hidden fields in your form.  Once you add these hidden fields to your form and place the form on your landing page, the URL Builder will display fields for mapping query string parameters iinto those fields.

I've got an understanding the URL builder - but my question is a bit different (although the answer may be the same).  If I've got a piece of content I want to promote - I believe Marketo cannot track actual clicks to a piece of content (is that true?) so let's imagine I place the content on a landing page.  I now want to distribute that content across a number of channels including Twitter, Linkedin, etc.  What's the best way to create links such that I can track the performance of each channel.  Perhaps, on the landing page, I should create a hidden field and store source (even if I don't have any other form elements on the page)?

Thoughts appreciated!

Marketo cannot track clicks on non-munchkin web pages, but it can track visits from those pages as long as the visitor does not have cookies disabled. 

However, if a web page visitor is anonymous (e.g. hasn't filled out a form yet), Marketo programs can't have anonymous visitors and therefore a smart campaign that uses the Change Status in Progression flow action on an anonymous visitor to update the progression status to "Visited" (for example) will fail. Only the known leads can have their progression status updated to "Visited". 

So what I do is create a smart list in the Program that will show how many known and anonymous leads visited the page during a given period from a particular source as determined by the presence of a unique querystring parameter for that source.  Keep in mind that this won't count multiple visits by the same lead.

I'm not sure that you can automatically submit a form with a value in a hidden field based on a page visit, but with javascript almost anything is possible.  What we do is store the querystring parameter in a cookie (e.g. Original_Source, sfdc_id_original, etc.) on the visitors machine and don't overwrite it after that.  In fact, we have a smart campaign that updates the Lead Source field on newly created anonymous lead records based on that cookie value and/or the Original Referrer value that Marketo automatically adds to the lead record.

Elliott - thanks for the replies - let me ask you this: if we're not dealing with the anonymous use case, then what is best practice for creating links to landing pages (with forms) across different channels?  URL Builder?  I'm thinking that if I'm going to share a link on Twitter, I'm probably better off creating the link with URL builder and then "bit.ly"ing the link.  This is an area that Pardot (which I'm coming from) did better than Marketo - so any advice appreciated.

If all channels go to the same landing page / form, the best practice is to use querystring parameters.  If you are using Google's display ad network for example, you shouldn't compress the URL that you send to them.  They will take care of that and autotag with other tracking data of their own.  When a lead clicks on the ad, the URL in the browser's address bar  when the LP is displayed will include your querystring parameters.