Are there issues in using munchkin code with Sitecore?

[Anonymous]

I am working on a big transformation project and part of it is a complete redo of the corporate website. The situation is that the company is using an agency to develop the website and they are using Sitecore to do this. The agency is threatened by the company's take-on of Marketo so are not being open regarding integration. I have used Marketo for many customers with various CMS systems, but have never been involved in the integration as it has always been in place when they brought me in.

1. Are there any difficulties with using munchkin code on Sitecore managed pages?  Is it as easy as including the munchkin code in the header of the pages?

2.  Are there any issues with embedding forms (2.0) on Sitecore pages?

I've researched on here and know that there are many users using both systems together, but I can't find the beginning of anyone's experience here, so would appreciate some insight. Dan Stevens​ you seem to be the person to ask here?

Many thanks -

Erica

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

Hi Erica - We've been on Sitecore as our website's CMS for a couple years now.  Munchkin is placed on every page of our site (in the footer, using Google Tag Manager) and we use embedded Marketo forms for every form on our site.  That's the easy part. As part of our phase 2 personalization effort, we're facing some challenges and uncertainties as we try to identify the most efficient and effective approach to integrate Marketo data into Sitecore:

• First of all, one of the reasons we migrated our website CMS to Sitecore – above and beyond our partner status with Sitecore – is the ability to offer relevant visitor experiences on our site.  Therefore, leveraging Marketo RTP would be overkill.
• We already have the DemandBase Sitecore Connector in place that allows us to retrieve real-time demographic/company attributes for those anonymous visitors who are identifiable by company (non-ISP, etc.).  We’ll be using attributes like INDUSTRY to enable us to serve up industry-related content when visitors first hit our site.
• We also want to leverage behavioral data in Marketo. Ideally both anonymous and known.  But unfortunately, Marketo doesn’t make the anonymous data accessible via the API.  And since there’s nothing in the users’ cookies to determine whether or not a cookied user is known or not, we’re going to be making a lot of meaningless API calls just to identify those known leads (and then additional calls using the lead ID to get that additional behavioral data).  Especially since the % of known users to overall visitors will be really small.  And that’s really where our team doesn’t have the experience on how best to do this.  One thought is - whenever we're able to identify a known lead and obtain their leadID (when making an API call based on cookie ID - is to store that value in a field within the users' Sitecore profile record.  And then when future visits are made, we can eliminate that initial call and retrieve activity data using the leadID right away. 

We're still in the early stages of this and are having daily meetings with our AppDev teams to figure out the best approach for all of this.  Once we do figure it out, I'll be sure to share our solution to others on the community.

[SanfordWhiteman]

• We also want to leverage behavioral data in Marketo. Ideally both anonymous and known. But unfortunately, Marketo doesn’t make the anonymous data accessible via the API. And since there’s nothing in the users’ cookies to determine whether or not a cookied user is known or not

Did you get my email update about this?

[Dan_Stevens_]

I did Sandy.  Even with the solution you presented, our fear is that we'll be making a slew of API calls for just a small percentage of usable data (known leads).  And, as you mentioned, Marketo doesn't give us access to the anonymous activity.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You know I don't advise ever using the API in response to individual end-user actions, so I'd have to agree just based on my own precedent.   If you only use calls for known leads (which you can do if you leverage my suggestion) and never repeat the action for a single lead throughout a given day (accepting that you will not pull intra-day updates) in theory you'd be able to govern usage.  Non-malicious usage, that is.  And if you need more calls, that means you're getting more leads, which is A Good Thing.  Of course malicious use rapidly sucks up all your relatively low call count, which is why I don't think the API is a good fit.

You might think instead about mirroring your Marketo database offline.  This is actually a really big project, but the payoff is you can get unlimited user-facing calls into the mirror db, which you run on your own systems. We do this for SFDC, for example, because even with 500K API calls per day that's way lower than the capacity of the typical website, so it becomes the weakest link.

[Dan_Stevens_]

If you only use calls for known leads (which you can do if you leverage my suggestion)

But you still need to make that initial call to determine if a lead is known or not.  But you're saying that the approach you gave would limit the number of call beyond that, right?  And then once we have the known leads, we would create that ID in the Sitecore profile and run a batch each night to obtain that day's data.  Which brings up another point: how would we limit this to only leads that have new data (vs. all leads)?

[SanfordWhiteman]

The method I gave you doesn't use an API call.

[SanfordWhiteman]

how would we limit this to only leads that have new data (vs. all leads)?

That's part of the pain and wonder of building a mirror -- using the Changes and Activities APIs to fetch changes.  The truth it's easier to get changed leads than to refresh with the baseline batch, for reasons that I could discuss with you offline (including a bug that was only fixed this week.).

[Anonymous]

That is very helpful, thank you very much. I'll be interested to follow how this goes for you. For our initial sprints, the munchkin and form integration will do what we need, but I suspect that the personalisation will become more of an issue a way down the road.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

I will also concur with Dan Stevens​.

Coming from a former employer who used Sitecore for 7+ years, the easy part is surely the addition of Munchkin and embedding forms.

Personalization was definitely on the roadmap, and the ability to leverage Sitecore's engine for personalization (including anonymous useage) coupled with enriched/ing data and pulling/pushing to and from Marketo once a lead is known was a definite plus.