Welcome to part two of my guide to integrating Google Analytics with Eloqua. If you have reached this page and want to read the first part of the guide (thoroughly recommended) then you can find it here: https://greg-staunton.com/google-analytics-tracking-on-eloqua-forms. 

In this part of the guide I am going to take you through “automatically setting UTM parameters and values to Eloqua emails”

Introduction

Now that you have a solid approach in place for using UTM parameters your web team will be over the moon. No more funky RegEx and dodgy readings from any of your campaigns for them to deal with. Whilst you can pat yourself on the back – and you should, we still have much more work to do so that you, the marketer can use this data for your own ends.

In order to do this you are going to want to store the UTM paramter values somewhere so you can analyze them and Eloqua isn’t going to do it for you.

By the time you have finished reading through this part of the guide you will have everything you need to automatically populate your UTM parameters on all outbound email from Eloqua.

Automatically setting UTM parameters and values to Eloqua emails

In order to setup Automatic Google Analytics integration with Eloqua you have to navigate to Email Configuration: Assets > Email Setup > Email Defaults.

You will be greeted with a view very similar to the one below here.

The parts you need to use are all part of External Tracking. On the top level you can automatically integrate Eloqua with 3rd party web tracking tools by ticking the checkbox and then selecting one of the Eloqua pre-built options for a number of popular web tracking tools.

However, what gets pushed out is not necessarily exactly what your web team need and from my experience this is an area that many implementations overlook. We have the ability to to create our own custom parameters that Eloqua will automatically append to every link on outbound emails.

To do this we will need to create a new 3rd party web tracking option for Eloqua to use. To do this you will need to open up Manage External Tracking. You will see a new window appear:

First you will need to click on New to create a new customized 3rd party web analytics integration query string. You will need to give it a name in Configuration Name, then you will need to create the Suffix.

The Suffix is the Google Analytics friendly query string that will be appended to every single link on your outbound emails. Prior to actually creating the suffix you will have needed to speak to your web analytics team first to find out exactly what it is they want sent over.

(In this example Google Analytics won’t let you deviate from their UTM parameters. If you are using Coremetrics, Webtrends, etc then in some cases you can.)

To create the suffix we are going to add the Google Analytics UTM parameters that are needed and then we are going to use the drop down boxes below to add in the values. The values that we choose will automatically become field merges. Every time an email is sent it out this field merge will populate the query string with the values that we tell it to in the exact same way you would populate first name on an email.

In this example your web analytics team have told you they need the following information:

• Campaign Name
• Email Name
• Medium
• Source

If you revert back to the first part of this guide you will be able to see all the different options we have for UTM parameters should you need to add in anything else.

Using the drop downs for the merge we would create the suffix:

utm_medium=Email&utm_source=Eloqua&utm_campaign=<eloqua type=”campaign” fieldname=”name” />&utm_content=<eloqua type=”emailfield” syntax=”elqWAEmailName” />

You can see that the Google Analytics UTM parameters are in bold.  You will need to type these in yourself.  The normal text again is text that you will need to put in yourself – anything being sent out of Eloqua will always have a medium of Email and a source of Eloqua.  The merges that are taking place come from an Eloqua system email and campaign field that I have inserted.

Finally you click on save and close.  This will take you back to the original Email Defaults options.  Now you simply click on the check box for External Tracking, select the Configuration Name that you have just created from the drop down list and then select save.

Job done!