IMPORTANT: Chili Piper now can do UTM tracking per Meeting Type. This may accommodate most scenarios and should be reviewed before continuing here. Continue with this article if you cannot use this feature in a custom booking flow.
UTM parameters are pretty beneficial for your marketing/sales efforts because they allow you to monitor your conversions, track an ad campaign's effectiveness, and allow you to see the sources that are getting people to book meetings with your team.
While there is a technical difference between UTM tracking and click-tracking (such as gclid or fbclid), for this article, we will treat them the same, as they are functionally the same when it comes to recording the values.
This article will show you how you can pass these UTM parameters through your form provider to Chili Piper as a hidden field and populate the respective field in your CRM.
Prerequisites
We assume you are using UTM parameters with your marketing automation or using Facebook or Google analytics click identifiers (fbclid / gclid) or some other URL-based tracking.
While we won't go into the specifics of how to set up UTM parameters with your marketing software, let's assume you are using utm_source on your URL to track the source of the click.
Eg: https://mypretendwebsite.com/landing_page?utm_source=twitter
The same kind of format would typically be used for gclid, fbclid, or whatever tracking variable your automation uses.
Adding a Hidden Form Field
To track the UTM parameter, we need to add this value as a form field in your Chili Piper routing web form. We don't want customers to see this value, so we set it up as a hidden field, e.g.:
<input type="hidden" id="utm_source" name="utm_source" value="Website">
Type = hidden, so that the prospects won't see this field on the form. We can still pass its value to Chili Piper! The value will be the actual field entry we are tracking. The goal is to dynamically populate the value from the URL in most cases.
From the URL
There are plenty of ways to capture the utm from the URL and insert it as the value in this form.
A typical way of doing this is storing the UTM parameters as cookies and then populating the form with those cookie values.
If you are providing your customers a direct booking link to the router or queue, then you can simply pass the UTM values through this URL directly to Chili Piper, which can then be mapped to your CRM!
More info on this method here.
Create your own tracking
It's also acceptable to create your own tracking here to save a wide variety of information - practically anything you'd like. For example, we can store which landing page / form the prospect filled out:
<input type="hidden" id="form_location" name="form_location" value="mainpage">
Lead Object structure
If you are using the Lead object structure for your form, this can be used either in conjunction with or instead of creating a hidden input. This may make it easier to work with pulling the value from the URL as well:
ChiliPiper.submit("account", "inbound-router", {
lead: {
FirstName: data.firstname,
LastName: data.lastname,
Email: data.email,
Company: data.company,
source_c: utm_source, // insert value directly from the URL
gclid: gclid
}});
Note that you don't need to include the fields as hidden form inputs with the above structure. You could supply the utm_source or gclid directly rather than using the "data" array.
Retrieving the value from the URL is detailed above.
Mapping the form in Chili Piper
You have a UTM parameter in your URL. You've successfully added it as a hidden field in your web form. Now what?
In both of the examples above, we provided a "name" for the field. eg: "utm_source" or "form_location"
In your workspace, head to the form associated with your Inbound Router and add a new field. We are telling the form mapping which field name to use from your live form and how to associate it with your CRM:
source_c is the field on the Lead / Contact object. utm_source is our hidden field name. These will likely differ depending on your Lead field setup and the name of the field on your web form.
When the prospect submits your web form, the source_c in the CRM will populate with the utm_source, populated from the URL.
Note: When editing the form mapping, you will see a "hidden" option available. This is used if you want to provide a specific value to a field every time or if you want to provide it via URL without the prospect needing to include it on the form.
There is no need to use a hidden field value here if we are providing it from the web form.
If you are passing the value via URL, you should leave the "field value" blank.