All posts tagged Data Profiling

Recently, I completed a gated form project for a client that protected three ‘kits’ of assets. The design and functionality were similar to that of most form landing pages I’ve personally project managed – except for one exception. They had a fair amount of targeted banner ads and plugs on various sites belonging to resellers, partners and other stakeholders of the particular product and the benefit of promoting it. A new marketing director had just joined their team and his first task was to quickly find a way to measure and assign these inbound leads from the very start of their clickstream.

Through the use of query string parameters (easily set up in Eloqua) a reseller, for example, could link a specific URL to the banner on their site, and when clicked, it identified to our client that this potential lead had come from them. This isn’t rocket science by any means, but depending on your business model, this scalable, simple and cost effective solution may provide you some basic attribution tracking if you are investing even a small amount (or just starting out) on branded placement on sites other than your own.

Initially, we created five query string parameters and added a sixth later on. Each one represented a type of campaign, lead source, and information about the reseller. A shortened example of what we developed would be this:

http://www.couch-associates.com/product_gated_forms.php?campaign=GatedFormBlitz&source=Banner&source_info=240×60&reseller_id=AJH567

The above URL would pass the following parameter values:
Campaign Name: Gated Form Blitz
Campaign Source: Banner
Source Info: 240×60
Reseller ID: AJH567

This told the marketing team which campaign had generated this lead – they had clicked on a banner, identifiable by the dimensions and the site from which the lead was generated was also captured. With this information, you can run visitor reporting in Eloqua to evaluate these known and unknown visitors to your site. Query string values are considered profile data in Eloqua and as such are tied to the visitor profile. If the visitor has been targeted correctly and they show interest, they may submit a form to acquire more information. At this point, you can now take the profile data and save it to the contact record. You will most likely need to enlist the help of a developer to provide with you some code to do this because you will need to get (grab) the parameter values from the URL and store them to a hidden form field.

Once the data is stored in the hidden fields, you can use an update rule to write the form data to any contact field, such as Lead Source – Most Recent (or Lead Source – Original if no value already exists) or other campaign fields. In our example, the client created all 6 fields to store this – but they had a good reason. Depending from which campaign a particular lead had responded, a different lead score was applied, and often, a score high enough to become marketing qualified and sent over to their CRM for sales to start the conversion process. In addition to the impact on lead score, certain parameter values that came across with the lead triggered different lead assignment/routing decisions, ensuring that specific leads were routed correctly to the sales representative best suited to engage.
What was originally applied to three gated assets is currently being implemented across another 30, and each high value asset download that generates from online advertising placement can be tied back to a unique and specific source. In the short term, this type of tracking will help you measure (and verify) the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts whether it be from Google Adwords, or in the case of our client, working with your third-party stakeholders to generate those valuable leads.

Part II: Coming Soon – Creating a form for resellers/partners that will allow them to generate their own referring URLs automatically.