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Emily_Smith
Emily_Smith
Level 2
October 23, 2015
Question

PDF download analytics and Marketo hosting pros & cons

  • October 23, 2015
  • 2 replies
  • 6404 views

I am a fairly new Marketo customer and still pretty early in the implementation stage for three non-profit brands. When we transitioned to Marketo, we kept all of our downloadable assets (PDFs of white papers, infographics, etc.) on our website. It is a very established site with strong SEO and traffic.  However, we recently noticed a big gap in some of our PDF download metrics when looking at Google Analytics. For example, we launched a new paper this summer and saw through our email analytics in Marketo that the PDF link had been clicked on 800+ times, but our Google Analytics data shows less than 100 downloads for the same PDF url.

We're researching ways to address this and I'm hoping to get some recommendations from the community. On the table right now are completing Google Analytics fixes like adding event tracking, or moving all of our PDFs over to Marketo. As a non-profit, we have limited internal technical capacity to help, so looking for solutions that will give us more accurate analytics without major ramp up time or ongoing maintenance. 

Bottom line questions I'm hoping to answer:

1) What are the pros and cons for hosting downloadable assets on Marketo vs on an established website?

2) Do you have any recommended tricks for ensuring basic Google Analytics accurately capture clicks to PDFs that originate from a Marketo email?

     -I've read about putting a landing page ahead of each PDF that autoredirects. Has this worked for anyone?

     -We're trying a fix in analytics to exclude "Mkt_tok" from URL query parameters based on this post. Integrating Google Analytics with Marketo Has this worked for anyone?

Thank you!

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2 replies

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
October 24, 2015

Using an interstitial page that logs a GA event before redirecting to the PDF will work fine. It's redundant from Marketo's perspective, but will help sync the two analytics packages.

Excluding mkt_tok from GA to de-unique-ify Marketo's tokenized URLs is a great practice.  @Courtney Grimes knows GA, as has been said, like whoa.

    Emily_Smith
    Emily_SmithAuthor
    Level 2
    October 28, 2015

    Thank you Sanford!

    Josh_Hill13
    Josh_Hill13
    Level 10
    October 24, 2015

    I suspect your site is a better place for most of your PDF or other assets. There is no particular advantage to placing these on Marketo. Your site is SEOd and probably setup to serve those files faster...at least it should be.

    Email and Marketo Hosted LPs should rely on *images* that reside in Marketo.

      Emily_Smith
      Emily_SmithAuthor
      Level 2
      October 28, 2015

      Thank you, Josh!

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