Affiliate tracking with anonymous ID

[Anna_Bruning1]

We're looking for a unique ID to pass over to our affiliate partners whenever affiliate leads fill out forms. Right now it is a very manual process to search for leads in Marketo or SFDC that our affiliate partners take credit for. It would be ideal to send a unique ID back to the affiliate at the point of form fillout so we can easily track what is coming in via affiliates.

My first thought was the Marketo ID but you can't run reports based on specific Marketo IDs so it's not a scalable solution. The key requirements is the ID can't have any identifiable details like email, name, phone, etc and needs to be available at the point of form fillout so it can automatically get bundled and sent back to our affiliate partner. We can't use our SFDC IDs because they won't be available immediately.

Has anyone found a good solution to this issue? I assume there has to be a decent work around to capture this data. Any suggestions are appreciated.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Using the Forms 2.0 JS API, add a randomly generated ID to the form as a hidden field.  That ID becomes a unique "job ID" for the form fillout.  Note that if you're not keeping a history of that field, then it will be overwritten if the same lead gets referred again, so you should block updates to it.

[Anonymous]

Hi Anna:

I would suggest using a hidden field in the form that is populated with the affiliates name.  Will something like that work for you?

[John_Clark1]

Hi Jamie,

I think Anna's looking for a way to uniquely identify every single lead, so affiliate's name wouldn't work.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Jamie, I assume we're talking about unique IDs per referred lead (which can be tied to the referrer via a static prefix like ReferrerCo-129873254) but not the same field for all leads.  If one just wants one field to ident ReferrerCo, then you could look for Filled Out Form constrained by a ReferrerCo-specific URL.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, that makes sense.  You could also use some page side scripting to populate the hidden field if there are more than one affiliates that could be referenced.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You already have to use JS to populate the hidden field, because that's how you choose a unique Id on the client (perhaps referrer prefix + timestamp + Math.random()).

[Anonymous]

I have the same/very similar issue: Landing pages for a referral scheme

Essentially I want to generate a unique URL that multiple leads can use and share widely that then ties back form completions to a unique ID of the person that shared the lead. I hope to do this by sending out to the referrer leads this link in an email:

www.example.com/landing-page?=referring_company=marketo.lead.id

.... but it seems one can not set lead.id as a token in an email.

Any suggestions?

Lee

[SanfordWhiteman]

{{Lead.Id}}