Marketo Landing pages and tracking in Google Analytics

[vijayvasu]

Hello Mozzers,

We use marketo to build out landing pages and then send out emails that point to the landing pages on Marketo, so the clicks go to marketo, and then from there to our site.

This is causing a bit of a problem in actually tracking our visitors and is artificially inflating our referral traffic and artificially lowering other traffic sources in GA as we keep pointing to Marketo landing pages.

What is the best way to track things correctly and without this issue?

Thank you for taking the time to help - I appreciate it.

Vijay

[Ray-pp]

Hi vijayvasu,

Your outline makes it seem like Google Analytics is reporting the numbers correctly.

• You email users with a link to your Marketo landing page
• Users click a link in your email, which direct them to the Marketo lp
• Users then click from the Marketo lp to your main site

This behavior would have Google report the traffic from your Marketo lp as referral traffic; and it would be correct. How do you want to view the stats?

Make sure to properly tag all your links, especially email links. Click stats on your email links will give you insight into the performance of those clicks and why traffic was generated to the Marketo lp.

[john4math]

Aren't the Marketo landing pages living on a subdomain of your site (and not on marketo.com)?  If that's the case, and you install the GA script on those pages just like any other pages, and have the GA profile set up to look at traffic from all subdomains (not just specifically one subdomain), things should work fine.

[JulesGCC]

Can I clarify with you guys please?

According to GA ... "You need to edit the tracking code snippet for cross domain tracking to work. " An example of the edits you need to make (to the new Universal code) as follows:

Find the create line in the snippet. For a website called example-1.com, it looks like this:
_ ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXX-Y', 'example-1.com'); Make the following changes to the snippet (the changes you need to make are in bold ):_

  ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXX-Y', **'auto', {'allowLinker': true});   ga('require', 'linker');   ga('linker:autoLink', ['example-2.com'] );**

Remember to replace the example tracking ID (UA-XXXXXX-Y) with your own tracking ID, and replace the example secondary domain (example-2.com) with your own secondary domain name.

So amongst other setup elements, if this process isn't followed, it could quite possibly track sessions and visits incorrectly, as well as your goals.

Thats my understanding, anyone under a different impression? Or has tried it first hand and knows for sure? I'd love to have a difinative answer...

[john4math]

Make sure you're set up to track multiple subdomains within your GA set up.  Then it should be the same script on your Marketo landing pages as well as your website.

The set up will be different if the landing pages aren't on your domain, but Marketo does support that.  If you're not doing that, you should!

[JulesGCC]

Hey thanks John. Yep got the subdomain stuff all sorted with MKTO, but I'm still not 100% sure about the tracking code side of things, the Google setup instructions here say the following;

Now suppose you have an online store and a 3rd-party shopping cart hosted on another domain, such as:

www.example-petstore.com
www.example-commerce-host.com/example-petstore/
Without cross domain customizations, a user who arrives your online store and then proceeds to your 3rd-party shopping cart is counted as two separate users with two separate sessions of different durations, which is not appropriate for this model.

You can, however, use cross-domain tracking to make sure that Analytics records traffic to these two sites to the same report. In web analytics, this is often called site linking. With it, a user to your online store who proceeds to your shopping cart is counted as one user—not two—and the session they started on the store is continued through to the time spent on the shopping cart.

Subdomains - You can use cross domain tracking to collect data from a primary domain, like www.example.com, and a subdomain, like www.subdomain.example.com, in a single Google Analytics account property.

From these Google instructions, it links through to how to setup cross domain tracking, which requires the minor edits to the tracking code that I posted earlier..
Your input/opinion (or anyone with experience in this area) would be greatly appreciated!!

Thank you

[john4math]

I think the script for Universal Analytics (new new version of GA) is built with subdomain tracking built in.  According to this Google article about cross domain tracking, "This document is only for tracking users across domains where browser restrictions prevent cookies from being shared. Tracking users across subdomains does not require any additional configuration."

I'd try the regular script, and see if you can see traffic on both URLs for all of your subdomains.  If you can, then it's working!