Give thank you pages a restricted access

Give thank you pages a restricted access

I've been looking for this solution, but from talking to marketo support - currently Marketo doesn't have a built in function to gate content. If someone who is not a known lead obtains the URL for one of the Marketo landing pages, they will be able to access that page. But in many scenarios - such as 'content download', you want leads to access the thank you page only upon submitting a form. I hope Marketo could build this soon.

20 Comments
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

There are numerous ways to "casually" restrict access that have been noted in the Community, like redirecting people to the form if their referrer (or other aspect, like a cookie) doesn't match what you'd expect.  Such things can be bypassed by a deliberate attacker, sure, but would prevent anyone from accidentally landing on the download page by clicking a URL.

I would not expect Marketo to truly secure asset downloads, because that suggests the notion of "authenticated sessions" which aren't feasible in an environment when you can obtain a session by entering a random email address.

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

On top of Sanford's answer,

This is why it's better not to give away the download link in the follow-up page and rather send it by email.

-Greg

Nicholas_Manojl
Level 9

Perhaps create a segment on the thankyou page that contains the content, and restrict that segment to people who have completed the desired form.

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

Hi Nicholas,

That is not easy to do, since segments cannot use behavior data.

-Greg

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

In fact it's impossible because the form fillout can't be expected to be reconciled with a lead on the next page view. The process is not synchronized with browser requests: it's asynchronous. This is frequently misunderstood.

Nicholas_Manojl
Level 9

Well I haven't tested it, and Sanford's point below is probably a very good reason why it wouldn't work anyhow, but I was thinking along the lines of a hidden field containing a value.

Anonymous
Not applicable

I have always been skeptical of the email follow up method because we have several instances where the lead doesn't receive our Marketo email ... likely due to spam blockers, even though we have DKIM and SPF set up. Sanford - the redirect option you mentioned - would that be enabled by deploying custom javascript on the thank you page template? Thanks!

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

I have always been skeptical of the email follow up method because we have several instances where the lead doesn't receive our Marketo email ..

Hmm, that's going to make them hard to acquire, though!

even though we have DKIM and SPF set up

Well, unless you have a branded sender domain, SPF doesn't matter, but just out of curiosity, what's your domain?  Lots of domains have broken SPF.

Sanford - the redirect option you mentioned - would that be enabled by deploying custom javascript on the thank you page template?

Yes.

Robb_Barrett
Marketo Employee

Lauren Rutledge​ - Ping me if you want the code. I have it that can do what Sanford is mentioning.

Adrian_Watkins
Level 3

Hi Robb,

Any chance you are willing to share the above mentioned code? It would come in very handy with the project i'm currently working on.

Thanks