{"id":49203,"date":"2019-07-23T07:00:55","date_gmt":"2019-07-23T14:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/?p=49203"},"modified":"2024-09-05T08:16:10","modified_gmt":"2024-09-05T15:16:10","slug":"online-to-offline-attribution-made-simple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/analytics\/online-to-offline-attribution-made-simple.htm","title":{"rendered":"Online-To-Offline Attribution Made Simple"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note: If you’re looking for a more comprehensive understanding of attribution, check out our Digital Marketer’s Guide to Attribution<\/a> for more info.<\/em><\/p>\n

The biggest issue facing most B2B lead-generation organizations today is attributing their best leads—you know, the ones that end up becoming paying customers—back to the marketing activity (or activities) that drove them to the website: paid campaigns, specific content, all that good stuff.<\/p>\n

Turns out, it’s not so hard to bridge the gap between your CRM, marketing automation (MA), and web analytics platforms if you know where to start. It’s a process called “closed-loop analytics<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Researching an Integration<\/h2>\n
Here at Portent, we use HubSpot for marketing automation and as our CRM. So, naturally, we were chomping at the bit to integrate with Google Analytics<\/a> for our online-to-offline attribution.<\/p>\n
If you’ve ever looked into this kind of integration before, Google’s documentation for integrating with popular CRMs is non-existent, with the exception of Google Analytics 360’s integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud<\/a>, which is exclusive to folks paying for the expensive, premium version of GA. There really are no best practices for this for free GA users. It’s the wild west out there.<\/p>\n
So where does one begin? The key is setting a non-PII (Personally Identifiable Information) User ID, which will serve as a way to join the online and offline data sets together in the reporting layer. (Note:<\/strong> Google Analytics doesn’t accept PII like email addresses or phone numbers.)<\/p>\n
Setting a Unique Identifier<\/h2>\nPortent developer extraordinaire, Andy Schaff<\/a>, formulated a simple script that serves two purposes:<\/p>\n
\n
To set a random unique identifier cookie for each website visitor (called RUID for short).<\/li>\n
To pass that ID as a hidden form field into any lead form the visitor fills out during their visit.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Here’s the script:<\/p>\n
\nfunction setCookie(cname, cvalue, exdays) {\n var d = new Date();\n d.setTime(d.getTime() + (exdays2460601000));\n var expires = \"expires=\"+ d.toUTCString();\n document.cookie = cname + \"=\" + cvalue + \";\" + expires + \";path=\/\";\n}\nfunction getCookie(cname) {\n var name = cname + \"=\";\n var decodedCookie = decodeURIComponent(document.cookie);\n var ca = decodedCookie.split(';');\n for(var i = 0; i <ca.length; i++) {\n var c = ca[i];\n while (c.charAt(0) == ' ') {\n c = c.substring(1);\n }\n if (c.indexOf(name) == 0) {\n return c.substring(name.length, c.length);\n }\n }\n return \"\";\n}\n\/\/ searches all input elements on the page with an id that starts with \"_guid_\" and writes the provided value\nfunction populateFormFields(value) {\n var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName(\"input\"), item;\n for (var i = 0, len = inputs.length; i < len; i++) { \n item = inputs[i];\n \/\/ item.id starts with _guid_\n if (item.id && item.id.indexOf(\"_guid_\") == 0) {\n document.getElementById(item.id).value = value;\n }\n }\n} \n\/\/ if cookie \"ruid\" does not exist, generate and write \nif (!getCookie(\"ruid\") || getCookie(\"ruid\") == \"\") { \n var ruidCookie = \"\";\n var chars = \"0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\";\n var length = 10;\n for (var i = length; i > 0; --i) \n ruidCookie += chars[Math.floor(Math.random() * chars.length)];\n \n \/\/ set \"ruid\" cookie with our alpha-numeric value. expires in 182 days, or ~6 months\n setCookie(\"ruid\", ruidCookie, 182);\n \/\/ set the \"ruid\" cookie value to the form field upon initial creation. this is an edge case for when a user first lands on the page\n populateFormFields(ruidCookie);\n} else if (getCookie(\"ruid\")) {\n \/\/ set the \"ruid\" cookie value to the form field.\n populateFormFields(getCookie(\"ruid\"));\n}\n<\/code><\/pre>\nYou might say “this looks like gibberish to me” and wonder how to deploy it to your website. Fortunately, this can be rolled out using a custom HTML tag via Google Tag Manager<\/a> without bothering your developer.<\/p>\n Passing the RUID into Google Analytics<\/h2>\nWhile you’re there deploying the RUID script in Google Tag Manager, you can also, conveniently, send it to Google Analytics with every pageview that occurs, even before a visitor fills out a form.<\/p>\nYou do this by setting a User-Defined Variable<\/a> which scrapes the value of the RUID cookie.<\/p>\n