Tracking original traffic source for long sales cycle
How we managed to get attribution right for this company with a long and complicated sale cycle.
They did the work in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of the other agencies.
Thanks to them, I can now confidently make critical business decisions based on accurate data. This is absolutely invaluable to our business!”
The problems
- With a very long and complicated funnel, tracking sales original traffic sources was almost impossible using traditional, cookie-based methods.
- They had no reporting tools and were doing almost everything manually using spreadsheets.
- They had absolutely no idea which marketing campaigns were generating sales.
- Using cookies to track long sales cycles is getting more difficult with browsers now having third-party cookie protection.
The solution
We noticed that their CRM (activecampaign) was their main source of truth. Almost every step of the funnel was tracked inside activecampaign. Mostly by using zapier.
We decided that it would only make sense to also add the original traffic source directly in their contact information once they complete the first step of their funnel.
In order to do that, we had to add hidden fields to their booking form (scheduleonce). By doing that, we were able to capture any query parameters we wanted and send them over to activeCampaign.
We captured the source, medium, campaign, content, term, gclid, and fbclid. With that information, we were not only able to know what was the original source for any buyers, but also send the gclid and fbclid information back to the right marketing platform to help the algorithm optimize their campaigns.
The last piece of the puzzle was to send activecampaign data to BigQuery. Once the data was there, we used that data source to build a simple dashboard that would help them visualize their data in a unified way.
The results
They were finally able to understand how each marketing platform performed and confidently change their strategy based on that data. They also saved about 5 hours a month on reporting alone which was a big win as well.
The technical stuff
Attribution report
- Filters (date range, sales rep, product purchased, source, medium, campaign, content, term)
- Source
- Medium
- Campaign
- Content
- Term
Technology used to build the dashboards
- Google data studio (data visualization)
- Google BigQuery
- Google sheets
- Google app scripts
- ActiveCampaign’s API
High-performing coach main technology stack
- ActiveCampaign
- ScheduleOnce
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- Linkedin ads
- Google sheets
- Zoom
- Leadpages
- Typeform
