Tagging paid traffic: Attributed to Campaigns vs. Actual Google/LinkedIn Data - Preferences?

[LiorK]

What's the best way to tag and track PPC traffic? 

We are a B2B agency running multiple campaigns for multiple clients.

Right now, if we tag ads using the Campaigns tool, any leads will be associated with that campaign but we don't get data about the actual Google ad or LinkedIn campaign the lead came for.

What are your preferences or best practices? How do you report this to your clients? How much detail do they ask for?

[Tanya · Accepted solution]

Hi LoriK,

HubSpot's recently added the "UTM Parameters" view to the reports and you can dig into what the terms and ads are there if you're using utm parameters for your tracking links:

Alternately, if you're in the traffic sources report and click on the "Paid Search" listing, it will show the campaigns. If you click on the campaign, it will show you the terms that generated clicks. 

It's a bit of legwork to get that info that way for a bunch of different campaigns but (IMO) worth the effort. 

[Tanya · Accepted solution]

Hi LoriK,

HubSpot's recently added the "UTM Parameters" view to the reports and you can dig into what the terms and ads are there if you're using utm parameters for your tracking links:

Alternately, if you're in the traffic sources report and click on the "Paid Search" listing, it will show the campaigns. If you click on the campaign, it will show you the terms that generated clicks. 

It's a bit of legwork to get that info that way for a bunch of different campaigns but (IMO) worth the effort. 

[LiorK]

@Tanya Thanks so much for your response.

So what UTM's do you recommend we use? Right now we use: medium, campaign, term, content & source. Do you set these up through the campaign tool?

[Tanya · Accepted solution]

You're right on point, those are the ones I'd recommend using. It doesn't necessarily matter if you set them up via the campaign URL builder or just use another tool but it DOES matter that you have a campaign created in HubSpot that is named the name of the campaign that you're using in your URLs exactly so that it can get attributed to that campaign and not just create an additional one. 

To identify which ad it is we just keep a spreadsheet of the ads and give them a naming system, then that's what we put in the "term" parameter but tbh, because we have conversion tracking set up in the platform we usually just get the data from there. We'll look in the ad platforms to see which particular ads convert and then also look in HubSpot to assess the quality of the leads from those sources. 

[LiorK]

When you say 'exactly' do you mean things like uppercase, lowercase, spaces, etc?

For example, if my campaign is called: 'Content Strategy 2018' on HubSpot, how should it look in the UTM tracker, 'utm_campaign=ContentStrategy2018'?

Also, what do you mean by the fact that you have 'conversion tracking set up in the platform'?

Thanks!

[Coopr]

Exactly means exactly - and I strongly suggest that when naming HubSpot Campaigns, you use the best convention for UTMs - which is "all lower case, replace spaces with dashes".

Thus, your HubSpot Campaign AND your UTM Campaign would be my-big-campaign 

[LiorK]

@Tanya Did you see my coment?

[Tanya]

Yes  @LiorK - I'm just putting together a blog post on this and hope to have it ready to post today or tomorrow. 

[LiorK]

@Tanya Thank you very much. Can you post the link here when it is live? 

[Tanya]

@LoriK - here's the blog post! Finally.   https://www.meticulosity.com/blog/creating-better-advertising-reports-in-hubspot

[LiorK]

@Tanya Do you know if we can associate contacts from offline sources with campaigns using UTMs? For example, we use Zapier to connect some paid sources. How can we associate them with the HubSpot campaign?

[Tanya]

Do you want to give me an example of what you mean?

Here is an example of a 'yes' to linking offline sources, but it might not ring true for what you're doing:

We use CallRail to track calls, and some of those calls originate from sources other than the website. We have CallRail set up to track conversions in Google Analytics and HubSpot so we know that there were calls from certain sources, but that data as to who they are doesn't always carry forward. In GA we see the source but not the contact and in HubSpot we see the contact but the source is "Offline". To bridge this gap we take a look at our customer list for the week and spot check those numbers with the CallRail data. Then we can update the "Offline" contact record in HubSpot to include the information and convert that "contact" to a "customer". 

[LiorK]

@Tanya

Thanks for responding!

Example 1 - Google AdWords using utm_campaign: as long as the campaign name matches the campaign we have on HubSpot, the contacts will be associated with that campaign as campaign influenced contacts.

Example 2 - Using Zapier for LeadGen: even if we have utm_campaign, because the data comes in through Zapier we lose the ability to connect contacts with a campaign.

Does this make sense? This is our conundrum

[Tanya]

Ah yes. I hate to say it, but for that you're going to have a data gap for what can happen in an automated process. But, if you're willing to put in the legwork to look at your source data and match the key contacts in HubSpot, you can update those HubSpot records and have a better data set for reporting. 

We do this for one of our clients and look at the actual customers, whose partial data is zapped into HubSpot from another source, and then update the HubSpot contact record with their data from the main source. It's more time efficient that updating all of the contacts that are imported and gives us those final conversion point metrics. 

Hope that helps!

[LiorK]

@Tanya It is still not clear to me how I can associate these Zapier contacts to a campaign without the UTM source.

[jennysowyrda]

Great question @LiorK!

@Tanya and @Kapil_Arora do you have any suggestions for @LiorK?