And even more importantly, we want to be able to answer the question: What are the main traffic sources that generate 80% of the business, from the pipeline? Without a doubt being able to know this would be great since we could dedicate the advertising investment to those PPC platforms and those campaigns that generate more results in terms of generated business volume.
How do you attribute a traffic source to a sale?
How do you know that a specific sale, for example of € 2,000 of monthly recurring business (MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue), was thanks to a certain source of traffic? For example, it could come from Google, Linkedin, Facebook, traffic derived from another website (referral), etc.Basically, it is known by analyzing the origin of the lead through which the sale was generated (simplifying a bit). Let's imagine the situation: a lead enters, is evaluated and it is observed that it is of very good quality. The sales team gets down to business and starts a conversation with this contact. After a while, imagine that the sale is closed, that is, the person who was captured as a business loan leads (let's imagine that he is the financial director of a company) decides to sign a contract between your company and his company. Well, in this case, the sale would have been undoubtedly achieved thanks to the professionalism of the sales team, but also thanks to the professionalism of the marketing department, which, thanks to an advertisement on Linkedin (or through Google Adwords), managed to capture the interest of the user and got him to leave his contact information. If you want to see examples of campaigns to generate B2B leads you can consult the article 5 campaigns to generate leads on Linkedin for your company.
What are UTMs? Essential for lead tracking
UTM's are labels that are placed at the end of a link (URL) to indicate the origin of the visit. The UTMs are composed of 5 fields (or labels), each of them informs about the context of the user when he accessed the URL and arrived at the web page that carries said link.The 5 fields that make up the UTMs are:
1) Source: utm_source
Indicates the source from which the visitor comes. As an example, the visit could come from Google, Bing, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. Knowing the source is essential, but as you will see in the next point within the same source, traffic can arrive from different routes (means).
2) Medium: utm_medium
Within the same source, there are different ways through which we can capture traffic, and in this sense, it is very useful to use the "utm_medium" field to label this information. Very typical values are:organic: indicates that the visit comes from an organic search. From what search engine? This is told by the "utm_source" field.
CPC (or PPC): indicates that the visit comes from "cost per click" (CPC) traffic or there are marketers who tag with "PPC" (pay per click).
social: indicates that the visit comes from a social advertisement.
Note that there are several options with this:
utm_source = google and utm_medium = organic: means that the user has done a Google search and has clicked on one of the organic results (SEO) and thus has reached our website.
utm_source = google and utm_medium = CPC: means that the user has done a search on Google and has clicked on our ad (which we have managed to place through a search campaign with Google Adwords).
Similarly, we can capture traffic from a social network such as Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook in two ways: through organizational publications or through advertising (pay per click). With the UTMs we can know:
utm_source = LinkedIn and utm_medium = social: indicates that the visit comes from a click on a «social» publication, made on Linkedin by social media.
utm_source = LinkedIn and utm_medium = CPC : indicates that the visit comes from a click on an ad on Linkedin of the sponsored post type, that is, a post made on Linkedin through pay-per-click advertising.
3) Campaign: utm_campaign
Indicate the campaign through which we have captured the visit. In this field, a (unique) identifier of our campaign is usually put, so that later we have traceability of the visit versus the campaign that originated it.4) Term: utm_term
It is a field a bit "wildcard" that serves to track what interests us the most. In Google Adwords, by default, this field is used to track the ad group from which the visitor comes. Although, we could use this field for other purposes, such as to specify the identifier of the ad or the keyword ("keyword") with which the click was captured, etc.
5) Content: utm_content
This field is also a bit of a 'wild card' and can be used for whatever suits you best. Putting certain values in these fields is still a convention, and therefore anything can be fine if it makes sense to us and we are consistently using the same criteria always.
In Google Adwords and some platforms, it is mandatory if UTMs are used to report at least 3 of the 5 tags, specifically, the source, medium, and campaign fields are the minimum 3 required (and recommended). And the "utm_term" and "utm_content" tags are usually optional, although I also recommend using them with values that provide information when tracking the origin of the lead.
How the URL is generated with UTMs
To add UTMs tags at the end of a URL we can do it in the following ways:
1. Add UTMs by hand
Adding the fields ourselves by hand with a text editor:
Example of adding UTMs by hand in a URL with a text editor
2. Add the UTMs with a tool
We can use some kind of tool that makes our work easier, we enter the "clean" URL, the UTM's values that we want and the tool assembles the URL with the UTM's. One of my favorite tools for tagging URLs with UTMs is the Raventools tool. In the following image I show you an example of how I would tag the URL of the Magnetica website if I had to configure it in a paid campaign on Linkedin:How to use the URL Builder for GA tool by raven tools
This would be the URL to use in the advertisement on Linkedin.
Always tag URLs in PPC campaigns
In order to calculate the origin of the leads of our PPC campaigns, it is super important that every ad we launch carries the URL labeled with the UTM fields if it can be with the 5 UTM fields. An advertiser who invests heavily in PPC advertising can easily have 50, 100, 300, etc. active campaigns (maybe that's your case). That means that when a lead enters, it can enter through a click on an ad in any of these campaigns. If we have 300 campaigns, which campaign does the lead come from? And if we generate 600 leads in a month, how do we know each lead from which campaign it comes? And how do we know which campaigns are generating the most MCA leads? Well, precisely by correctly labeling the URLs with the UTMs fields, to begin with.This implies that if we create, for example, a carousel ad on Linkedin we will have to tag the URL with the UTM fields:
the source and medium are usually quite unanimous about what to put, LinkedIn / CPC.
And the rest of the fields according to our case.
When the user clicks on the ad, they access the landing page with the UTMs loaded in the web address. From there, if we use a tool such as Google Analytics for web analytics, when the user accesses the web with the UTMs, all the information of their session (page views, average time on page, etc.) will be recorded in Google Analytics, together with information on the origin of the traffic (source, medium, campaign, term, content).
How to see the origin of the traffic in Google Analytics?
Before explaining how to see the origin of the traffic in Google Analytics you should know that in Google Analytics there are:Metrics: these are measurements, such as the number of page views, the number of sessions, the average time spent on a page, etc.
Dimensions: are "things" on which you can make measurements, that is, calculate metrics. For example, the country or city from which a user accesses the web is a dimension. Or the type of device you use, or the mobile model you use, etc. Well, luckily in Google Analytics there are 5 UTM fields as dimensions.
To see the source of traffic in Google Analytics we can use these 2 ways:
1) Using the standard Acquisition report
For this we will have to access the Google Analytics account >> Reports >> Acquisition >> Source / Medium: and we will see something like this:
Acquisition report Google Analytics to see traffic source
2) By secondary dimensions
Or, visualize the information we want and add one of the UTMs as a secondary dimension (they are within the " Acquisition " and " Advertising " group):
visualization of UTMs in Google Analytics with a secondary dimension
What if you don't tag the URLs with the UTM fields?
If you do not add the UTM tags in the URLs that you use for the ads of your PPC campaigns, what will happen is that the reports you generate on the origin of the traffic and leads will not be accurate and in the end, the analysis of which traffic sources contribute To generate more leads and generate more business will be biased, so much so that it is very likely that you will draw the wrong conclusions and make bad decisions when planning the investment in each PPC platform.For example, what would happen if we don't tag the ads on Linkedin? When the user clicks on the ad, they will land on the landing page configured in the ad as is, that is, the URL without UTMs will be loaded in their browser. In the case of Google Analytics, luckily, it is quite intelligent and most likely it will detect that it comes from Linkedin, but the sure thing that it will not detect is that it comes from advertising on Linkedin. Therefore Google Analtyics would hit the source (LinkedIn) but would miss the medium (CPC). And therefore all the metrics would be imprecise and wrong.
In the case of the attribution of the origin of the lead, it already depends on how technically we have implemented the assignment of these 5 UTMs to the specific lead that enters our system, but most likely if we do not label the URL the lead will enter as if it came from direct traffic, that is, as if the user had typed the URL by hand.
How to measure the origin of the leads?
In the previous point, I have shown you how you can see the origin of the traffic using Google Analytics. But in order to answer the question of which advertising sources contribute the most to generating business we have to reach the level of lead attribution. In other words, it is not enough to say that we have generated 2,069 user sessions thanks to paid traffic on Linkedin, but rather that we have to be able to say for each of the leads that we have captured from what source, medium, campaign, term, and content we generate them. This implies that the UTMs have to "propagate" down to the lead level.
How to pass UTM values to lead?
There are several technical ways to do this and at the same time, it will depend largely on the options offered by the lead management software that we use. The steps at the conceptual level in one of the most complete ways in my opinion are:We create lead capture forms using a marketing automation tool. For example, if we work with Hubspot we can generate forms to download the content, and on the web page, we place a code that makes the form display (embedded code of the form).
As fields of the form, we add 5 hidden fields, which will precisely be where we will store the UTM information of the URL.
At the execution level, the sequence is as follows:
The user sees one of our ads and clicks on it.
Access the landing page through the URL tagged with the UTMs. So, our landing page is loaded in the browser along with the UTMs
At the code level on our website, we have to capture the UTMs of the URL and assign these values to the hidden fields of the form (UTM fields of the form).
The user reads the landing and decides that he wants to download the content, so he fills in the form (name, surname, email, etc.) and hits the send button.
The lead enters our lead management system and we already have:
The fields that the user has filled in (name, surname, email ...)
The UTM fields, which without the user knowing it, have been recorded in the hidden fields of the form with the values that were in the URL.
What do you think of this method? It seems a bit bizarre but believes me if I tell you that the level of maturity of digital marketing today is like this. When I started in the world of digital marketing, I thought that all this would be more advanced, that it would not be necessary to tag the URLs of the ads, etc., and I was surprised to see that it is so.
Speaking with colleagues in the sector, they tell me that what some companies do is use a specific landing page per channel (and they clone the landing page for each channel they use), so that they only send traffic from that channel to that landing page. In this case, they can know the source and the medium because it is a fixed value that is configured a priori. But to know the campaign, the keyword, etc. some kind of parameterization is needed again. This solution can be a temporary "workaround", but one of the handicaps that I see is that if the user jumps from the landing page to the home page (which is quite common) and converts, we will surely lose the traceability of the lead. And we go back to before,
Use Hubspot to capture UTMs and know the origin of the lead
To achieve what I have explained in the previous point, you need to do a little development with code (depending on what your website is programmed with). But there is an alternative that does practically what I have explained to you and that is Hubspot. Hubspot is a marketing automation tool and among many of its functionalities, it allows you to capture the origin of the lead. To this end, it works with 3 fields to attribute the origin of the lead, these fields are:
Original source type
Original source data 1
Original source data 2
Hubspot fields to track the origin of the lead
The UTMs are 5 fields and Hubspot only has 3?
If you have asked yourself this question, you have already seen the limitation of using the standard Hubspot system. Hubspot interprets the UTMs of the URLs but when storing the origin of the lead it only uses 3 fields.
If you want more information on how Hubspot does the attribution of lead origin, I recommend that you read a super complete article called: « How does HubSpot categorize sessions, contacts, and customers in the sources report? «. From this article, I think it is important to highlight that Hubspot also uses the de facto standard of UTMs to make the attribution of the origin of the lead. And to do this, it has defined rules, which are applied in order of appearance, the first rule that is fulfilled implies that certain values are assigned on the origin of the lead:
rules Hubspot uses to assign the lead origin
Do you see again why it is so important to tag the URLs we use in marketing with the correct UTMs values?
Complexities when tracking the lead
I am aware that all this is quite technical, that it is very technical marketing. But let me finish the article by simply highlighting that all of the above tells us the origin with which the business loan leads was captured with a certain precision. Let me list just a few issues:Multi-device: What happens if the user accesses for the first time from his mobile through an advertisement and then on his computer he directly accesses the web and fills in the form? surely the lead will enter as direct traffic, when in fact a pay-per-click channel contributed to capturing the user's attention.
Multi-attribution: What happens if the user accesses our website several times, each time through a different channel? For example, first, you access via an ad on Linkedin, then through an ad on Facebook, and finally through an ad with Adroll? When do we look at the lead in the system with what source will it say that it has been captured? If it is with Hubspot it will say the first. But if we do the development that I mentioned earlier, we can model the attribution system as we want. We could even save all the attributes of all the clicks that the user has made.
Multi-funnel: Well, once we have the lead in the system. What happens if the user downloads other content after 5 days through another channel? And after 3 more days, ask for a demo through another source/medium/campaign? Note that in order to answer the question at the beginning of the article, from which sources generate more business we need to know both how the lead was captured for the first time as well as to know through which channels we have managed to get the user to go down the funnel until buying. In the case of the standard implementation of Hubspot, this part remains "lame", on the other hand, with the implementation that I explained to you, it would be possible to have the vision of all user interaction as it progresses through the funnel.
Let's track the leads!
Well, I hope this article helps you to know how to measure the origin of leads in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, and in fact, this same theory can be extended to other traffic channels other than PPC, as can be it email marketing, organic traffic or other sources.
Do you want to share how you do it? Or how have you seen it done in some companies? It would be great, just make your comment at the end of this article.
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