Marketo Cookies Across Multiple Domains

Many new customers are confused as to how Marketo’s munchkin code works when it is applied on different, separate domains. They often expect to be able to automatically track behavior on multiple domains just by using the munchkin code and cooking someone once.

Unfortunately, (and fortunately) it doesn’t work this way. If you could set a cookie for any domain, well, you could inject your munchkin javascript to any site and set a cookie for any domain. Think of the privacy laws and security havoc this would wreak.

Marketo’s munchkin uses what is called first party cookies. Put simply for non-technical folks, this means that each record in your database must be cookied in each domain first before we can track their behavior.  The good news is once a record is cookied in more than one domain all their web activity is combined into the activity log of their record in Marketo.

As a reminder, these are the primary out of the box ways a marketer can set cookies on a domain with very little, if any, technical resources involved:

  • Marketo Forms – embed Marketo form(s) on the domain so that once someone fills out a form they are cookied
  • Click links in an Marketo email - send an email to your database with links that when clicked will have the record land on a page on the domain where the munchkin code has been applied. When the person clicks the link, they are cookied

If you have a technical resource available to you, there are other ways you can set cookies using our APIs and no Marketo forms or emails. While the two methods above require very little technical resources, you do need a lot of creativity in creating your call to actions – which is exactly what marketers do best.

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