How to stitch visitors and SFMC subscribers?

Did you have setup the Parameter Management in Marketing Cloud? If yes, the Marketing Cloud subscriberKey is added to the click out URL’s. Next step is to catch the parameter when a SFMC subscriber clicks on a link in an email and navigates to your website.

In our example we will be using:

 mcparam=%%subscriberkey%%

Example Google Tag Manager setup

Creating custom variable for query parameter

To store the parameter as a variable take the following steps:

1. Navigate to your GTM container
2. Navigate to ‘Variables’
3. Add a new ‘User defined variable’
4. Configure the variable type as a ‘URL’
5. Choose component type ‘Query’
6. In the ‘Query Key’ field enter the parameter you used in the Parameter Management
7. Save the variable

Configure trigger subscriberKey Marketing Cloud

To listen for the parameter we need to setup a trigger. This trigger will fire when the parameter is found.

1. Go to ‘Triggers’
2. Add new trigger
3. Choose Trigger Type ‘Page View’
4. Fire trigger on ‘Some Page Views’
5. Include the newly created variable ‘SubscriberParameter’
6. Choose dos not match Regex ‘^(undefined|null|0|false|NaN|)$’
7. Save trigger

{{Variable}} does not match RegEx (ignore case) ^(undefined|null|0|false|NaN|)$

Store subscriberKey in cookie via new tag

To be able to also use the subscriberKey after the first pageview, you can store the subscriberKey in a cookie. To do so follow these steps.

1. Navigate to ‘Tags’
2. Create new tag
3. Choose ‘Custom HTML’
4. Use your own script or use our example cookie script below
5. Use the trigger we created above ‘mcparam query’

Example cookie javaScript

<script>
 
var cookieName  = "mcparam"; 
var cookieValue = {{subscriberParameter}};
var cookiePath  = "/";
var domain  = ".youdomain.com";
var expirationTime = 31536000;                           //For example one month in seconds (2628000)
expirationTime = expirationTime * 1000;                 //Convert expirationtime to milliseconds
 
var date = new Date();                                  //Create javascript date object
var dateTimeNow = date.getTime();                       //Get current time in milliseconds since 1 january 1970 (Unix time)
date.setTime(dateTimeNow + expirationTime);             //Set expiration time (Time now + one month)
var expirationTime = date.toUTCString();                //Convert milliseconds to UTC time string
document.cookie = cookieName+"="+cookieValue+"; expires="+expirationTime+"; domain="+domain+"; path="+cookiePath;  //Set cookie
</script>

Add custom variable to capture cookie value

Last step is to store the cookie value in a custom variable for future use. Follow the steps below to do so.

• Navigate to ‘Variables’
• Add a new ‘User defined variable’
• Configure the variable type as a ‘1st Party Cookie’
• Enter ‘mcparam’ as the Cookie Name
• Save the variable

Next step using the variable in Google Tag Manager tags

After creating an interaction in Activation Studio and exporting the TPL file. You can configure the tag to include the subscriberKey. This is mandatory to link interactions in Marketing Cloud with subscribers.

1. Setup new Tag
2. Configure the variable fields
3. Link SubscriberKey with the custom variable ‘mcparam’ created above
4. Choose a trigger; for example all pageviews
5. Use an exception for when the variable ‘mcparam’ is null

Creating an exception trigger

To make sure we won’t trigger when the variable is empty, you can setup an exception trigger.

{{Variable}} matches RegEx (ignore case) ^(undefined|null|0|false|NaN|)$