How To Use URL Tracking To Convert More SaaS Free Trials

We’ve got a huge bunch of new features we’re thrilled to announce for the Hull platform. We’ll call it “the Tracking Update”.

This edition will unpack a wide variety of ways to track visitors and prospects through links in your advertising campaigns, outbound emails, social shares, community updates, referrals, and so much more.

The URL Shortener

The world changed when the top digital advertising platforms offered pixels for advertiser’s domains. It basically meant that marketers could more effectively retarget by building special audiences in their respective platforms.

Thus, a slightly better margin on ad spend, better results and click-through rates, and of course, engaged prospects. Boom!

The only problem?

You can’t build a custom audience from all of your pixels at once.

With Hull’s new URL Shortener, you can now insert your favorite retargeting pixels from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin into the URL of your choice, track clicks on the URL, and map it all back to a Hull Profile.

Build highly targeted segments and push them as custom audiences back to your favorite retargeting platforms.

The crazy part?

It even works on domains you don’t own.

That’s right. You heard me. Now you can retarget the Facebook users who click your Medium Link on Twitter!

View the URL Shortener Documentation

Track Form Submissions through Hull.js

This one is a personal favorite. And it’s so simple.

Marketers know the importance of a good tech stack to do what they do. And there’s a good chance they’re using some kind of form builder to capture information from known prospects and support lead generation efforts.

Hull.js now supports form tracking - no matter the form:

• Listen to form submissions on a page where Hull.js is installed
• When a visitor submits, log an event inside of the user’s Hull Profile
• Use custom logic to extract form properties and form name

Now, you can capture form data from your landing pages and map it back to their Hull Profile.

For a real-world example, this script does a bunch of things:

• Tracks the Playbooks landing page,
• Grabs all of the information from the form,
• Logs the event Viewed Playbooks in their user profile, and
• Logs a form submission event as Form Submitted in their user profile as well.

window.hullAsyncInit = function(hull) {
  hull.trackForm(
    document.getElementsByTagName('form'),
    'Form Submitted',
    function(f){
      var form = { source: 'playbooks' };
      $($(f).serializeArray()).each(function(i, field){
        form[field.name] = field.value
      });
      return form;
    }
    );
  hull.track("Viewed Playbooks");
}

After your form tracking script is added to your landing page, you’ll get to pull in that submitted form data and log whichever events and attributes you want.

From there, the world is your oyster! 🐚 (Or shell… whatever).

View the Form Tracking Documentation in Hull.js

Introducing the QueryString API: Track users through the QueryString with Hull.js

Marketing and sales teams have become far more technical and sophisticated in how they launch campaigns, track prospects and results, personalize experiences, and produce highly specific segments.

Here at Hull, it became quite clear that accomplishing things like sending cold outbound emails to prospects and tracking their visit information into one complete profile should be an easy task.

Or perhaps the marketing and sales teams want to bring true visibility into a campaign — no matter the channel.

Hull.js now supports tracking through the query string of a URL and can pass data through the parameters you select. This helps to round out a known or unknown visitor’s Hull Profile with more relevant information by tracking email clickthroughs, social media clicks, and ads, for instance.

This is an excellent solution if you want to be able to:

• Trigger Hull tracking when a specific user visits the page
• Log a specific event or activity when a known (or unknown) visitor clicks a link
  • For example, Viewed Pricing Page or Viewed ABM Campaign XYZ Landing Page
• Assign a visitor to a specific campaign
• Pass attributes through a URL
• Set the anonymous ID for a user
• Pass a property like a campaign name attached to an event through a URL

It’s incredibly easy to use - just like you would append a UTM query string for Google Analytics, simply add in the parameter(s) of your choice as a query string at the end of whatever URL you want to track where Hull.js is installed.

For example, this URL: http://test.com/?hjs_event=Clicked%20Email&hjs_aid=fooBar1234&hjs_prop_emailCampaign=ABM+Campaign&hjs_trait_name=Elon+Musk

This will trigger the following events inside of Hull:

hull.traits({ name: 'Elon Musk' });
hull.track('Clicked Email', { 'emailCampaign': 'ABM Campaign' });
hull.alias('fooBar123');

The most obvious use case is that now you can seamlessly track clicks from your emails and link your outreach efforts to anonymous visitors on your website.

View the QueryString Tracking Documentation in Hull.js