Keeping Thank You pages on the same CNAME as Marketo LPs

[SanfordWhiteman]

This was a nice catch by user AD on the Community and something I somehow missed before! It has significant effects on tracking and on branding in general.

When you set up Domain Aliases in Marketo (and corresponding CNAMEs in DNS) you can access your Marketo-hosted LPs via a choice of different URLs. The path/page name stays the same, but you can use a different domain.

      For example, you can use go.example.com for the bulk of your pages, but publish some pages under get.mymicrositeexample.com for special products. The pages will actually be accessible under any of your Aliases as well as your Primary (i.e. if somebody manually changed the URL in their browser) but by taking care to link to the preferred domain from ads, social, and email, you can keep content/layout/logos/etc. totally different.

    If you're an agency, you might even use Domain Aliases to service multiple clients at the same time, the only restriction being you can't use the exact same /pagename but would have to mix it up like /jiffylube_coupons_2017 and /spiffylube_coupons_2017.

Cool concept, so... ?

Problem is, “siloing” Domain Aliases from each other falls apart if you select a Thank You page from the dropdown of Marketo LPs.

Read the full post on TEKNKL :: Blog →​​

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Sandford,

Thx for putting this one in writing. I am continuing reminding my customer to pay attention to this, but now, I have the written quide

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi again Sanford Whiteman ,

the code misses a verification that the follow-up page belongs to one of the Marketo CNAMEs. It might be a page from the web site or an external page, in which case you do not want the domain to be changed.

I see 2 ways of acomplishing this:

- If the form is in a Marketo LP, one can managed whether or your this code is fired with a LP Variable

- Or one provides in the JS the list of Marketo domain redirects and the JS checks against this list before changing the Follow-Up Page domain

But you would probably see a better way of accomplishing this

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

The code misses a verification that the follow-up page belongs to one of the Marketo CNAMEs.

Well yes, but that's where the bug exists, so you wouldn't work around it where you don't need to...

Or one provides in the JS the list of Marketo domain redirects and the JS checks against this list before changing the Follow-Up Page domain

Totally doable! But then you have to maintain it.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

HI Sanford,

Agreeing with your comments. On the first point, the issue is that we are delivering LP templates to end users, but we cannot control whether they are going to use Marketo LP's as follow-ups or other pages (from their web sites, their blog or even a third party).

So the code should only fire when the FU page is a Marketo hosted one.

As a 1st level, I would simply use a boolean variable in the LP templates to let the user choose whether or not they want to have the check to run, but I think that, as an admin, I would rather have to maintain the code in my LP templates each time I add a domain redirect than letting my users on their own. Don't you think so ? Or may be I am missing something or not interpreting your code correctly

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

but I think that, as an admin, I would rather have to maintain the code in my LP templates each time I add a domain redirect than letting my users on their own.

Yes, I agree with not trusting the users. I wouldn't add it to the template explicitly (since then they'd have to reapprove) but in a top-level token.