How to use Google UTM parameters and Pardot to track the Lead Source of every Opportunity

The point of UTM tracking is quite simple — give Google Analytics the information or ‘data points’ it needs, to make reports that enable you to analyse and improve website and general marketing performance.

If you want to be able to accurately track the Lead Source for every prospect and Closed Won Opportunity in your CRM, it’s also super important to get the UTM parameters right for marketing automation systems like Pardot.

I’m first going to kick off with an in-depth description of Google UTM parameters and the correct way to use them — as this will form the base data for your Lead Source tracking in Salesforce and Pardot. After that, I will show you how to then add the correct Lead Source to every Opportunity you have in Salesforce.

UTM Tracking Codes

A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. This enables Google Analytics to tell you where searchers came from as well as what campaign directed them to you. The standard values are as follows:

UTM Campaign
UTM Source
UTM Medium
UTM Content
UTM Term

If you have ever used Google URL builder or built Custom Redirects in Pardot you will be familiar with them. Let’s quickly go through how each one should be used.

UTM Source

The Source (or traffic source) is the origin of the website traffic you are obtaining.

It must be completely unique to the provider:

For example:

appexchange / referral, ‘appexchange’ is the traffic source

google / organic, ‘google’ is the traffic source

twitter / social, ‘twitter’ is the traffic source

newsletter / email, ‘newsletter’ is the traffic source

Some important points:

Source names are case sensitive in both Google Analytics and Pardot.

Using appexchange, AppExchange and Appexchange in your UTM parameters will result in them being treated as different traffic sources in GA and Pardot (which you really don’t need or want).

Note: The Source in your UTM parameter will automatically populate the Source field in Pardot when someone visits your site (if they have not visited before).

UTM Medium

The UTM Medium is the category of traffic source as defined by Google.

The standard UTM Medium values are:

organic
direct
social
email
referral
paid
display
(other)

These values are predefined and must always be in lower case.

For example:

appexchange / referral, ‘referral’ is the medium

google / organic, ‘organic’ is the medium

twitter / social, ‘social’ is the medium

newsletter / email, ‘email’ is the medium

Without wanting to sound like a broken record, medium names are case sensitive. So email, Email and EMAIL are all treated as different mediums in GA. In the case of your channel reporting, Email and EMAIL be designated to ‘other’ traffic (see further down) because they do not use one of the predefined UTM Medium values stated above.

Understanding Channels

In Google Analytics, a channel is a group of several traffic sources with the same medium. I find it really useful to group and report on website traffic performance by each medium — like social, email, direct or referral traffic.

You can view channels in Google Analytics by going to:

1 Acquisition > Overview report
2 Acquisition > All traffic > Channels report
3 Conversions > Multi Channel Funnels > Overview report
4 Conversions > Multi Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths report

‘Custom Channel’ values.

Google Analytics also gives you the ability to set up custom channels.

If you have a large newsletter subscriber base you may consider setting up “newsletter” as a channel so you can split traffic generated by each newsletter in your channel reporting. Alternatively, if you work a lot with partners you may look at setting up “partner” as a channel, so you could view traffic generated from all partners in a GA Channel. I may cover this in a future post but there is plenty online about it.

Direct

The direct traffic channel is made up of traffic where the ‘traffic source’ is unknown to Google Analytics. This pretty much means that whenever a referrer is not passed, Google Analytics will treat the traffic as direct.

For example:

When traffic comes from a mobile app or an instant messenger like Skype the referrer is not passed, so Google Analytics treats this traffic as direct.

The same applies if a user is visiting a website directly via a bookmark or clicking an HTML email link that has no tracking parameters set (which should NEVER be the case!).

Other

The (Other) marketing channel is made up of everything else

#1 Salesforce Usage Report/ linkedin
#2 salesforceben / community
#3 londonscalling / event
#4 salesforce usage report / pdf-document
#5 twitter / (not set)

That’s UTM Medium finished — I hope you’re still with me.

Campaign

Campaign is the name of your Campaign (phew, nice and simple).

For example:

salesforce usage report 2017
newsletter
dreamforce 17
world tour london 17

Once again, we want to build GA reports to look at the performance of a single campaign across all the sources (like Twitter, Linkedin and individual partners) as well as by channels (like email, social and natural search).

To achieve this you simply need to use a consistent UTM campaign name across all your UTM tracked links any single campaign. No surprises here but campaign names are also case sensitive. So salesforce report, Salesforce report and Salesforce Report will all be treated as different campaigns in GA.

Important: You need to turn on the option to make Pardot create the UTM Campaign as a new Pardot Campaign. If you don’t, new visitors will get lumped into your standard “Website Tracking” campaign.

Campaign Content

Campaign Content is used to differentiate between content pieces or marketing messages for a specific Campaign.

For example,

In the case of salesforce usage report / infographic / newsletter / email

salesforce usage report is the ‘campaign’
infographic_a is the ‘campaign content’
newsletter is the ‘source’
email is the ‘medium/channel’

In the case of salesforce usage report / download today / salesforceben / referral

salesforce usage report is the ‘campaign’
download today is the ‘campaign content’
salesforceben is the ‘source’
referral — medium/channel

NB: You only really look at Campaign Content in the Context of a Campaign. If the campaign has a singular purpose, the campaign content UTM is not necessary.

You can see everything in practice on the following link: Download Ebsta’s 2017 Salesforce Usage Report for free (cheeky SEO link, but hey, I’m in Marketing).

Campaign Term

Last and definitely least for me is Campaign Term — which is used in paid search to differentiate between ads.

Example:

running+shoes
air+max
nike+id+sale

So what does that have to do with Pardot Lead Source and ROI Tracking?

The very moment you install Pardot on your website it tracks every visitor and their originating source or ‘First Touch’. This magic code in the background is your secret weapon to track the Lead Source for every prospect you generate and every Opportunity you close.

Providing you are using UTM parameters correctly on every social post, email campaign, partner website link and so on, Pardot will always correctly associate the correct Lead Source to each new prospect.

This is very powerful. For instance, if you don’t track “Twitter” as the source for all Twitter posts, then you’ll never know if there is any ROI for this social channel.

In addition, if you don’t use UTM parameters consistently and correctly, then you won’t be able to view all traffic and goal completions in GA relating to every aspect of your online and offline marketing efforts.

Tracking website performance by Medium or Channel is pretty standard practice now in SaaS, with your board or management wanting to see growth/improvement across social, referrals, natural website traffic — especially with all the hype of this ‘content marketing’ thing!

But here is the magic..

Go to your Opportunities report in Pardot and look at every Closed Opportunity with a Campaign (Lead Source) associated to it.

Pardot here is looking at every Opportunity you have in Salesforce and then looking at the Lead Source of the associated Contact Role. (This will of course work only work if you have ‘Contact Roles’ associated with every Opportunity in Salesforce. If you don’t have Contact Roles, I put together this quick guide on how to force Contact Roles to be Added to an Opportunity)

You can export this report to get the Salesforce Opportunity ID and Lead Source in a CSV file, enabling you to import the Lead Source data back into Salesforce via Apex Data Loader.

You may ask why this has to be a manual affair when Salesforce and Pardot are so closely linked, but I prefer it this way. Campaigns in Pardot always have duplications and typos where inconsistent UTM tracking values have been used. With this manual process, you have the chance to clean up your Lead Source values before the import, so as to not have duplications and ‘crap’ in your Salesforce reporting. I find doing this once a week is sufficient for Ebsta but you can make your own call on that.

Once you have done the import you can begin to build Salesforce dashboards like this:

Conclusion

Get this right and you’ll not only have a useful instance of Google Analytics — you’ll also be able to accurately track the Lead Source for every Opportunity in Salesforce. No marketing person in their right mind would pass up that opportunity.

‘First Touch’ source attribution is not the ‘be all and end all’ of marketing ROI calculations but it certainly fuels a more intelligent way of looking at marketing performance and campaign returns.

Have fun.