Question from user:
Hi, sorry this might be long. My company has been working with two consulting teams/ Salesforce implementors for the past 5 months.
They’ve set up quite a bit on the sales tracking and reporting side of things – but none of them can solve marketing attribution.
I use UTM tracking for all of our Google Ads and Meta Ads, I’ve synced our GA4 Account and Ads accounts with Salesforce, we currently have a script written to collect this UTM information on our Pardot/Account Engagement forms and nothing is working.
It baffles me that thousands of dollars and several developers can’t understand how to pull UTM information and have that added to fields in Salesforce.
All we need to see is whether or not someone comes from Google, Meta, Organically etc. I feel like I’m at such a loss, the devs and consultants don’t understand the marketing side of it and how absolutely important attribution tracking is.
Please, if you have faced this problem or have solved it, could you share it here so us marketers can get some sleep at night. It can’t be that hard!
Answer from Nabil:
This is a super frustrating situation, and you’re absolutely right to be concerned – attribution is everything.
It sounds like the consultants may be stuck in the standard out-of-the-box Salesforce/Pardot approach, which often struggles with robust, multi-touch attribution, especially when third-party cookies are involved.
The good news is, there’s a modern, server-side approach that completely solves this problem and gives you highly accurate data flowing directly into Salesforce.
The reason your current setup isn’t working is likely due to the inherent limitations of browser-side tracking and basic form scripts, especially with Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and other privacy measures that strip UTMs or block cookies.
The solution is to move to a server-side tracking architecture using a combination of APIs and a central data collection point.
The awesome solution you’re looking for leverages the power of all those tools you mentioned working together: Salesforce API + Account Engagement API + Google Ads API + Facebook Conversions API + Google Analytics Data API + Google Tag Manager + Stape (or Google Cloud Platform).
Here’s the idea: instead of relying on a flaky browser script to capture UTMs and map them to fields on form submission, you use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to collect all the necessary first-party data, including UTMs, the user’s Client ID (from GA4), and a unique identifier immediately upon their first visit.
Then, instead of sending that data directly to Google Analytics (GA) from the browser, you send it server-side using a tool like Stape (a managed Server-Side GTM environment) or a custom setup on Google Cloud Platform.
This server-side container acts as a centralized brain.
When a conversion happens, like a form submission, the form sends a unique identifier back to the server.
The server can then match this identifier with all the rich attribution data it collected earlier, effectively stitching the session data to the lead.
The server-side environment is much more robust because it bypasses browser limitations and gives you full control.
From there, the server-side solution uses the Google Ads API and the Facebook Conversions API to send back the high-quality conversion data, including all the attribution information, directly to those platforms.
This improves your bid strategies and audience matching significantly.
Simultaneously, you use the Google Analytics Data API to query session data and the Salesforce API or Account Engagement API to push the completed, verified attribution data directly into the appropriate Lead/Contact/Opportunity fields in Salesforce.
This holistic approach gives you several key benefits: it uses server-side tracking to ensure accurate data collection, uses the various marketing platform APIs (Google/Meta) for superior campaign optimization, and finally, uses the Salesforce/Pardot APIs to guarantee that clean, stitched, and complete attribution fields (like “First Channel,” “Last Channel,” and the specific UTM values) are populated in your CRM, moving past the limitations of browser-side cookie-dependent tracking.
This ensures that every lead or contact record has the data you need to calculate ROI and finally get some sleep.
You’re not just pulling UTMs; you’re building a complete, privacy-compliant, server-side data stream.
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