It Pays to Have a Marketer Who Codes
Some time ago I was creating a landing page for a client and their regularly scheduled webinars. Apart from the design and content I was also setting up the mechanics and automation of letting people register, sending automated confirmations and reminders, tracking conversion rates, and passing registrant information to the CRM as leads.
Since I planned to experiment with different tactics to promote the webinars, it would be important to note in the CRM which campaign brought the registrant to the landing page. This would show not only the number leads each campaign resulted in—easy to do with basic analytics tools—but also the quality of each campaign after the leads were graded in the CRM by the sales team.
The campaign information is passed to the landing page using UTM tags as URL parameters, but passing those parameters through the form to the CRM was a top-tier feature of the form service. We were on the basic tier, and an upgrade would cost several thousand dollars per year.
Although I understand and agree with packaging features based on value rather than complexity (ie, price discrimination), this seemed so simple that the idea of paying thousands more per year for it made me stop to think.
I then realized that since our analytics tools report on campaign sources, then they must be parsing the UTM tags and storing them in cookies. Maybe I can write a script that checks the cookie for stored campaign values and inserts them into hidden fields within the form? It turned out to be even easier than that: The analytics tool makes the data available in a JavaScript object.
A few minutes later I had small working script on the landing page that pulled the visitors’ source data—source, medium, campaign, and referrer—from the analytics tool’s javascript object and into the form and thus into the CRM upon form submission. I messaged the team to say they just saved several thousand dollars and can now evaluate campaigns based on the quality of leads, and went to lunch.
