Hey guys,
The marketing campaigns that drive “leads” are Adwords, LinkedIn, etc for us. What we do right now is put them in Zoho CRM, in their own fields. There’s about 30-40 fields of this external marketing data that gets stored in the CRM.
This is important to analyze the source of all these leads, subscribers (and deals, in CRM). What’s the best way to do this?
I’m trying to get rid of Zoho CRM.
Thanks!
Hi Mham,
Just like in most CRM’s you’ll have to create custom fields for this:
As far as analysis goes, ActiveCampaign isn’t very good at this… the only way to do this is via the filtering of lists or tagging.
Maybe a feature request is in order that can show pipelines based on sources. You could of course set up varying pipelines, but I’m not sure that solves the analysis issue in a constructive way.
I’ve been working on trying to get something working correctly with URL parameters and the Segment.com integration to truly attribute source to lead to deal - but AC’s support haven’t been so forthcoming despite this being a pretty basic marketeer requirement.
Thanks @mattermarketing! You’re right, it seems to be non-existent. I think in this regard apps like InfusionSoft are great. But yeah, I wonder if this isn’t available because AC started off catering to just emailers.
We really need to be able to have source data, and segmenting based on that. Where’s your feature request, so I can upvote it?
Hi @mham,
There seems to be a general lack of source data requests beyond UTM parameters which is all a bit clumsy. I’d really like to see this automated. I’m arguing with AC support at present on the Segment.com “integration”.
We can parse and send the UTM params with our own code. But it’s not the best way of doing it. I find it odd because Segment has them already, we never touch them it’s just part of having the segment script in the header… So Segment has all the pieces but it seems like the integration doesn’t put them back together.
It’s not really an integration - hence my ironic inverted commas.
So I’ll create a new feature request for this - probably to be ignored. AC may have started as an email tool, but now it’s positioned as:
All-in-one marketing platform
Grow your business and save time with a seamless experience.
What’s the key metric of marketeers? ROI.
I’ve just added my comments to this… but can’t upvote as it’s been closed.
Ridiculous!
Hi @mham,
I’ve been onto support further on this.
They say:
The utm parameters are passed in as part of the URL specified in the “search” trait in the Page call. They’re not passed in as separate traits, so there’s no way for us to identify them as custom fields on our end. What you could do is modify the code on your end to detect them and then add them as traits to the Segment Page call in your code. Then, if you’ve added them as custom fields in ActiveCampaign, they’ll be detected and updated for contacts.
But…
This doesn’t solve the problem.
The reason why I didn’t suggest it long time ago is it only works if they arrive directly on the quote form page. If they enter from some other page we have to set session/cookie variables to store them until they submit the form. Hence the Segment integration!
Any ideas welcome. Starting to lose the will to succeed on this.
@jason, @Ted, no comments here?
@mattermarketing brings up some great points. Just wondering if there’s a heavy CRM rewrite coming up, or if the integrations can get better?
Personally, I’d like to move everyone to use AC as their main CRM. But marketing (and sales) analytics are quite important. If we can’t show RoI on a channel, it’s a bust.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the boost… This is clearly an issue of some resonance with a whole host of people who are serious about ActiveCampaign.
My AC Forum digest contained 5 stories - 4/5 were about tracking.
Looking deeper into this, what’s the point in tracking if you can’t then attribute and use the insight to do more of the right stuff?
BASICS.
I think we need a call with their product guys to redirect their priorities and efforts.
If you have some feedback for the segment integration I would post it as specific feedback changes in a new topic so others can vote on it as well. We are not done with the Segment integration – we actually have more updates in the pipeline that will be going live as soon as it is ready on Segment’s end…
As for the CRM – we have a massive update to contact & deal mgmt in the works that should be available as a limited BETA very soon (Preview of new contact/deal view)
Thanks @jason. Can you tell us if source-based reporting is going to be easy in AC after the new version hits?
I also voted up to this Sales/CRM reporting suggestion:
The update introduces quite a few updates to the CRM and contact management aspects. We have separate efforts for reporting and a much larger data based release (that we are not discussing at detail yet) Brining tags/fields/etc… to deals is a step – but we are looking to have a much easier “out of the box” type of solution for tracking both source and conversions.
Oh can’t wait for the “out of the box” solution. It really would make AC the full solution. Not like Zoho who is hacking together some MA and tacking it on their sales CRM.
Hi @mham and @jason - thanks for taking the time to work through this.
In the meantime, I’ve had a Wordpress plugin created that simply adds the Segment script to the head, plus parses the utm parameters and fires Identify with them. At this stage the Identify call uses the anonymous ID of the user who has just landed on the site.
Then, in the formidable form “success message” are the other Segment calls. The identify here only needs to provide email, name and phone using the form field IDs.
I’m sure it’ll work with any form plugin, or even the AC tracking itself.
This means we no longer need to have any hidden fields with that utm shortcode.
JS example:
if(~location.search.indexOf(‘utm’)){
var utmTraits = {};
location.search.substr(1).split("&").forEach(function§ {utmTraits[p.split("=")[0]] = decodeURIComponent(p.split("=")[1])});
analytics.identify({campaign: utmTraits[‘utm_campaign’], keyword: utmTraits[‘utm_term’], source: utmTraits[‘utm_source’], medium: utmTraits[‘utm_medium’], adContent: utmTraits[‘utm_content’] }, { integrations: { ‘ActiveCampaign’: false } } );
}
It’s been a long and arduous task to achieve this. I’m just not sure why. I don’t know why the AC integration with Segment can’t read these parameters. It’d make my life so much easier.
Happy to help anyone reading this who has the same issue.
Vote here please ---->>> https://feedback.activecampaign.com/forums/238014-feedback-ideas/suggestions/13658109-improve-utm-and-source-tracking-with-segment-com
That’s awesome, thanks so much for the contribution @mattermarketing. I haven’t used Segment, and might take me some time to get there… but got my fingers crossed for the native reporting @jason talked about. 