In summary, we want to track where users who completed our free trial request (ActiveCampaign form) came from, specifically, which of our paid ads or retargeting campaigns they clicked on to get to our site.
We have set up our form and added a hidden field ‘advertising’ - this contains our code which is set to track the utm parameters that are in the URL of our paid ad links.
This form is embedded into our free trial request Wordpress page.
We have also created a tag on Google Tag Manager and set it to fire on all pages on the website where we have a free trial request form.
When we test this using a paid ad link it would appear than the URL disappears after we navigate from the landing page to the free trial request page. And the source of the user does not get stored under the hidden ‘advertising’ field - thus, when we check the contact details it is blank under that field.
Any suggestions or help would be appreciated, and if any further details are required (coding etc) we will attach it.
I’m working on a longer answer for you, but assuming you have site tracking turned on, you should already have access to this information, even historically.
To see all of the users that have clicked on an ad (assuming you included query parameters to track the click) you can navigate to contacts and create an advanced search. You want to check if the user has ever visited a page that contains your tracking parameter.
What I would recommend doing however, is using Event Tracking to fire a “Clicked Ad” event on the landing pages, if the query parameters are present. Then include the details from the utm_ parameters in the event data. From that point you can use an automation to add tags* sparingly as you see fit. Adding a tag for every campaign, ad creative etc is probably more information than you will need, and you will have access to it in the site visits or event tracking data regardless.
Hope that helps!
I recommend adding tags instead of a form field so that you can append multiple tags, if it takes multiple ad clicks/campaigns to convert from awareness to acquisition.
