video: Taking it back to basics

Hey, what's up everybody? This is Ryan Gunn with Aptitude eight and today I'm gonna walk through a foundational building block for doing custom attribution in HubSpot. So what we're talking about today is capturing UTM parameters. If you're not familiar with that, you've probably seen tracking links. They're long URLs. They have a bunch of what looks like bits of code at the end and those extra pieces of code store information about where that link is. So for example, if I'm creating a LinkedIn ad, I can create a custom u r L for that ad and that allows me to put in information like what campaign it's for the specific creative we're using, what platform we're running the ad on, that kind of thing. So before we get into how to actually use U T M parameters, how to capture that information for attribution, I wanna show you what the, the results of this look like, what kind of reporting we can do using U T M information.

So here I've got a report of close one revenue based on the last medium and source that was captured before a deal was created. If you look here, this bottom row shows the different mediums, which you can think of as kind of channels that we used. And then you can drill down in here and see for organic social that LinkedIn drove the majority of our organic social and resulted in almost half a million in revenue. So you can do that for each of these. It's all pulled from these links and capturing that information onto the contact record and then passing it onto the deal record. So the first thing that you're gonna need to know how to do is actually build these tracking links. HubSpot has a native tracking URL builder, so you can find this in your settings. It also exists within the campaigns tool, but this makes things really simple. You just click create a url, you can type in the website and then it, this will uh, populate with all of the HubSpot campaigns that you already have built. And then it also allows you to select from HubSpot's default sources. So here, let's say we're gonna post it on LinkedIn, then it will make you select a network. So

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And it will automatically populate the medium. This LinkedIn is your source. U t m term is something that you would use if you're doing search advertising. So it would be that the keyword that you are trying to rank for. And then content. There are a few different ways you can do this. I like to use it to show the type of content that it is. So if it's an ebook or a blog post or something along those lines that you're linking to. Another way to use it would be is if, if you have multiple ads running that are promoting the same thing and you want to differentiate between them and see how, how they perform, you can make this like ad variation 1, 2, 3 and track them that way. But then you just hit create and you've got, I've got two different ones here, but it allows you to copy a short url or you can copy the full tracking url.

This is where you can see those U T M campaign equals attribution test campaign. U T M source equals LinkedIn utm medium equals social. And then here's the original URL without any tracking. So when you're using these, if you're, if you're posting them on social or in an ad, you would either copy this tracking URL or the short url. The HubSpot tracking URL builder is, it's easy to use. It automatically pulls in your HubSpot campaign information and it works with HubSpot's default source property. So if you are a fan of how they organize that stuff and that works for your business, that's awesome. The downside is that it's not very customizable. You are stuck with HubSpot's default dropdown options for medium and source. And if the way that they categorize things doesn't really work for your business, then you, you don't really have an option to change it.

So that's where a custom U T M tracking link builder comes in handy. So I've created this spreadsheet which will automatically create tracking URLs for you. As you can see here, you just like with the HubSpot one, you enter a base U r l, I've got a campaigns tab here that you can use to standardize your naming convention. As you can see here, I've got the year, the quarter, and then the asset type or the asset name. Uh, and that will just populate a, uh, campaign name for you, which you can use in HubSpot if you would like to. And then this dropdown just pulls from those campaigns that are created here. You don't necessarily need to use that if your naming convention is different. You can just type in a name. And then we also have custom options for channel and source here in this U T M data validation page.

I've got my medium options here, and if you wanted to customize those, you could edit this uh, header column and then the sources that correspond to each medium are underneath and you can add a bunch more so that it fits your business and you're not stuck with just what HubSpot uses by default. So once you enter in all of this information, it will pop out a tracking link and you can use this in the exact same way that you would use one that's generated by HubSpot. So the next step, now that you've got your tracking link, you have sent it out either in an ad or a social post, or you've sent it to a partner for them to use. There's any number of ways you can get these URLs out into the world, but ultimately the result of that is that they are going to click on it, fill out a form, and you will then need to capture that information.

So the next step is you need to build these five custom contact properties and it's important that you match these exactly, because if you leave out the underscore or you spell something wrong, then the form is not gonna capture that u t M parameter information. So I've got a, uh, consultation form here as an example. And you can see down here I have all five of these parameters added in as hidden fields. So you do that by just hitting this checkbox right here to make this field hidden. And that is going to make sure that when people actually see the form on your website, they don't see these fields, but it still grabs that information from the tracking url. So once you have that, you can update your form. And then the next time someone submits a uh, form submission that, and they came from a tracking link, this will capture that information and it will be stored on the contact record. So thanks for watching that. I will be back soon with more attribution content to show you how we can actually use this information in terms of attribution and reporting, and you can use it to influence your marketing.