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A
Anonymous
March 24, 2016
Question

Tracking Referral Source

  • March 24, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 8113 views

I am trying to understand if Marketo is able to track site traffic sources. I see the fields (source detail, source info...etc) but cannot see any sources that haven't come from a marketo email form or other marketo instance.

Similar to google analytics, I would like to know where anonymous/known leads are coming from to get to our site. I know the form/page they filled out to become known but I don't see anything for referral source, source information....etc

Is this a Marketo limitation or do I need to set something up?

I can see the highest performing marketo forms (gated content), and in a perfect world it'd be great to see how they got to our site (organic search, referral, social...etc)

If anyone knows the answer to this question that would be AWESOME.

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2 replies

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
March 24, 2016

Hi Harrison,

If the leads are coming from referrers you control, you may want to add some URL parameters to the URL you post on these sources and capture these parameters in hidden fields.

There is a lot of post on this topic in the community. e.g.:

Capturing Lead Source Using UTM Fields​​

UTM best practices?

-Greg

    A
    Anonymous
    March 24, 2016

    Thanks Greg!

    And if the leads are coming from referrers I don't know? Say a 3rd party blog (referral), or a search engine?

    Justin_Norris1
    Justin_Norris1
    Level 10
    March 25, 2016

    Harrison Peralta​

    Marketo does have a field called Original Referrer which will capture the referrer string of the first visit, even if you don't control the referring URL. It's up to you to parse that out using smart campaign logic to determine whether that referral was due to organic search, referring site, etc. and then you can assign a Lead Source based on this. This takes some trial and error and maintenance.

    If you want to capture every referrer (and not just the original) without relying solely on UTMs then this is a bit more difficult. I have heard of some experimental methods for this using a Visits Webpage trigger (when referrer does not contain your domain) and then using a {{trigger.Referrer}} token to capture the referrer. You could concatenate a list of all referrers into a long text field this way.

    However, this is cumbersome at best. If you really want to track all visits in a more Google Analytics-like fashion, then I would recommend a tool like Bizible that is set up to do this out of the box. It is an excellent complement to Marketo for this purpose.

      Alexandra_Ash
      Alexandra_Ash
      Level 2
      September 14, 2016

      Additionally, is there a way to specifically see WHO is coming from where? We have a report similar to GA that is 'leads by source' where we can see how many leads we're getting by google search, bing, etc. but the report doesn't include specific names. Is there a filter or way to be able to add/capture this information? Thanks!

      Jessica_Kao3
      Jessica_Kao3
      Level 7
      September 15, 2016

      If you are using the analytics report leads by source in Marketo, then you have the data.  You would need to create a smart list Lead source = google and that will give you actual names.  Are these people captured in programs, with acquisition programs being set and success statuses set when they come in?  Setting those things up allow you to add cost, track membership, FT and MT attribution and answer are the people coming in from google the right people turning into pipeline and revenue. 

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