The easiest way to capture UTM parameters in your Typo3 website
Learn the easiest way to capture UTM parameters in your Typo3 website and send them through to your CRM and other tools
In order to grow your business, you need to know who your potential clients are and how to reach them. Once you know who they are, you can then come up with the best marketing strategies for attracting them and converting them into customers.
However, if your efforts don't produce enough leads, revenue, and prospects, it can be difficult to know where you went wrong.
The best way to ensure success is to keep track of the source of all your leads in your CRM system. This will help you keep track of which marketing channels are working and which ones aren't.
This article will teach you how to capture UTM parameters on your Typo3 website and send them into your CRM so you can run reports that show you which marketing channels & campaigns are working and which one's aren't.
4 steps for capturing UTM parameters in Typo3
Using Attributer to capture UTM parameters in your Typo3 website is easy. Here's how to do it in 4 easy steps:
1. Add UTM parameters to your ads
To track your website visitors and leads, you need to include UTM parameters in your ads and campaigns. These UTM parameters help analytics tools like Attributer understand where your visitors and leads are coming from.
In order to effectively track all your website traffic, be sure to include UTM parameters in all of your campaigns – including social media, search engines, email campaigns, display advertising and more.
2. Add hidden fields to your forms
Next, you need to add hidden fields to any of the lead capture forms on your site. This could be your Contact Us form, your Request A Quote form or whatever other forms you use to convert website visitors into leads.
Hidden fields can be easily added to an Typo3 website by simply dragging the field type 'hidden' into the form builder. You can also make a field hidden if it is already there.
The fields you need to add are as follows:
- Channel
- Channel Drilldown 1
- Channel Drilldown 2
- Channel Drilldown 3
- Landing Page
- Landing Page Group
3. Attributer automatically completes the hidden fields with UTM parameters
Now that you've added UTM parameters to your campaigns and hidden fields to your forms, Attributer will monitor your website's visitors for UTM parameters and then include them when those visitors complete a form with the hidden fields you added.
This following example demonstrates how Attributer works using Dropbox as an example:
Imagine a Google user searches for "How to share enormous files", comes across a Dropbox ad, and fills out a form on the website.
Depending on the UTM parameters the marketing team at Dropbox used, Attributer might complete the hidden fields as follows:
- Channel = Paid Search
- Channel Drilldown 1 = Google
- Channel Drilldown 2 = Brand Campaign
- Channel Drilldown 3 = Dropbox
On top of this, Attributer will also include information about the first page the lead saw on your website, which might look a bit like this:
- Landing Page = www.dropbox.com/features/share
- Landing Page Group = Features
"
4. UTM parameters are passed into your CRM
When the form is submitted, the hidden fields containing the UTM parameters are captured along with the lead's name, email, or phone.
You can then use Typo3's native integrations or 3rd party tools like Zapier to send the data to your CRM and other tools (like Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, etc).
And once the data reaches your tools, you can use it to run reports that show things like:
- How many leads were generated by your Facebook ads?
- How many customers came from Google Ads?
- How much revenue has our SEO efforts generated?
What is Attributer?
Now that you understand the 4 steps for capturing UTM parameters in Typo3 using Attributer, you might be wondering what Attributer is and how it works.
Attributer is essentially a bit of code that you place on your site. When a visitor arrives on your site, it looks at a bunch of technical information about them (UTM parameters, referrer, device, etc) to understand how they found your website..
Based on this, it will then categorise each visitor into a channel like Paid Search, Organic Search, Paid Social, and so on (similar channels to what you see in Google Analytics), and store the data in a cookie in the visitor's browser.
Then, when the users completes one of the lead capture forms with the hidden fields, Attributer will write the UTM parameters into the hidden fields in the form.
Finally, when the form is submitted, the UTM parameters and other marketing attribution data will be passed through to your CRM & other tools along with the lead's name, email, and phone.
Attributer is used on hundreds of websites and captures marketing attribution data on over 1.7 million visitors every single month.
Why using Attributer is better than capturing raw UTM parameters
There are other tools and methods for capturing UTM parameters on your Typo3 website, so why use Attributer?
Here's why it's so much better:
1. Captures all traffic
Data on ALL sources of traffic to your website are collected by Attributer and sent to your CRM and other marketing tools.
This includes paid channels that you have been able to add UTM parameters to (like Paid Search or Paid Social), but also channels that don't have UTM parameters (Like Organic Social and Organic Search, Direct, Referral, etc.).
This allows you to really determine which channels are most productive for your business's growth, not just which of your paid ads are performing best.
2. Remembers the data
Other alternatives for capturing UTM parameters require that the UTM parameters are present on the page where the form is completed.
To illustrate why this is a problem, imagine someone clicks one of your Google Ads and goes to a dedicated page you created for that campaign.
Once they’re convinced they need your product/service, they click the ‘Get A Quote’ button and are directed to a different page to complete your quote request form.
This means that the page they complete your quote request form on is not the page they originally arrived on, so the UTM parameters are lost.
Fortunately, Attributer saves the UTM parameters in a cookie in the user’s browser so regardless of what page the user completes a form on, the UTM parameters will always be relayed through.
3. Provides cleaner data
Another problem with some of the alternative UTM capturing methods is that they just pass in the raw UTM parameters, which can often result in messy reports that make it difficult to understand the ROI of your campaigns.
For instance, imagine some of your Google Ads campaigns are tagged with UTM Source=Google and others with UTM Source = Adwords.
When you pass this data into your CRM and run a report to see how many leads & customers have come from your Google Ads campaigns, these will actually show up as two different sources.
Attributer recognises that these inconsistencies often exist, and would assign these leads to the Paid Search channel regardless.
4. Captures landing page data as well
Have you ever wondered how many customers and leads you get from your blog?
Beyond just capturing UTM parameters and other data about how a lead got to your site, but it also captures information on what content got them there.
So you could run reports that show you things like:
- How many leads has my blog generated?
- How many customers have been generated from our blogging efforts?
- Which of our blog posts are getting the most leads and customers?
- What's the ROI of our blogging initiative?
Wrap up
Attributer is simple to setup and can provide you with powerful data on what's working to grow your business and what isn't.
So get a 14-day free trial to find out if it is right for your needs.
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About the Author
Aaron Beashel is the founder of Attributer and has over 15 years of experience in marketing & analytics. He is a recognized expert in the subject and has written articles for leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Search Engine Journal, Buffer, Unbounce & more. Learn more about Aaron here.