How to Track Your Paid Advertising Through Marketo

As much as we all love inbound marketing, paid media is also an important part of the marketing strategy. No matter the size of your paid advertising budget, it is important it is to spend wisely. That means you need to know not just which ads drove clicks, but which ads drove conversions and actual revenue.

Marketo’s advanced reporting tools allow you to set up either first-touch or multi-touch attribution to understand the success of your touchpoints. You can pull your paid advertising data into Marketo’s reporting to track how well your paid digital ads perform. Here’s how:

Track Paid Advertising in Marketo Using UTMs or Integrations

Regardless of which ad network you are using, UTMs should be the first step in your tracking strategy.

At a high level, you should use a different UTM for each ad you create and point all your ads to forms that push data into Marketo. Create UTM fields in Marketo to easily capture parameters like source and campaign for each of your leads. Your UTM tracking can be as simple or complex as you need.

Once you build out your UTM strategy, use those fields to set up your digital advertising revenue attribution in Marketo:

• First, build a default program for your ad campaign.
• Then, set up a smart list and smart campaign to listen for the UTMs you specified. Marketo’s examples assume that you are using Marketo forms and landing pages, but you can use a similar approach with a third-party form tool.
• Finally, define a Marketo program success outcome for your ad campaign. This is usually synonymous with your conversion metric (downloads, form fills, and so on).

If you’re using Facebook Lead Ads or LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms (which capture leads entirely within their respective platforms), you’re in luck. Marketo has integrations for Facebook Lead Ads and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms that push your data into Marketo-no UTMs required.

Set Up Marketo’s Advanced Reporting

Once you’re tracking your digital ads, the next step is to report on them. Here are some advanced Marketo analytics tools you may want to consider:

Program Cost Analysis Area: Once you’ve set up Marketo programs for each of your paid ad campaigns, you can use these reports to view ROI across all of those programs.

If you have Marketo’s Revenue Cycle Modeler (RCM) set up, you can map out your Buyer’s Journey and use that model to drive additional reporting:

Track Marketo Conversion Data in Your Ad Networks

Understanding which ads are converting in Marketo helps you calculate ROI and determine how to direct your spend. But it can also be helpful to see which ads are performing well in your paid advertising tools, particularly to optimize ad quality and relevance.

Thankfully, Marketo allows you to push conversion data back to Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords) and Facebook Lead Ads:

You can also improve your ads’ effectiveness by targeting people who are already engaging with you. Marketo’s LaunchPoint service allows you to push lists of leads from Marketo into Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn so you can send more targeted ads.

How are you tracking your digital ad spend? Let us know what’s working and where you need help. We’d be happy to support your team.

Originally published at www.smartbugmedia.com.