Can you have landing pages that *don't* track?

[James_Glavin]

Hi there,

We have a couple of use cases where we want to have a landing page with form, that doesn't track visitors to that page. In both cases it is because the person filling in the form will be submitting someone else's information. (One use case is a referral form, the second is an event RSVP form that our sales team will use to reply on behalf of contacts who RSVP via email or offline). What I'm trying to avoid happening is someone filling in the form and Marketo mistakenly making a link between that person's browser and the submitted contact. This will lead to incorrect tracking/scoring etc of that contact.

I'm thinking that if we just remove the Marketo tracking munchkin from the landing page and the thank you page, that this should do the trick. But has anyone got any experience of doing this, who can confirm this works?

(A workaround we've tried is using a browser's incognito mode when submitting these forms, but often our sales team would forget, so I'm trying to eliminate the possibility of error!)

Thanks,

James

[Elliott_Lowe1]

Remove the following line from your page template to NOT load the munchkin code:

<?php echo $mContext['endElements']; ?>

[Anonymous]

Just wanted to add that I think Marketo must have added a UI feature for this since this comment was made. In the template editor, munchkin tracking can be done with Template Actions > Disable Munchkin Tracking.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

James, you have to not only stop Munchkin from loading on the Landing Page (as Elliott noted) you must also suppress any existing Munchkin cookies from earlier page views from being sent to the server along with the form post. Without these two steps, you can't meet your goal.

The recipe MktoMunchkin :: Clear Cookie and Restore shows you how this is accomplished .  Replace 'example.com' with your registered domain.

Another approach is dedicating a domain to these special data entry pages (not another <hostname>.acistours.com, but a domain like www.acistours-sales.com).  You never run Munchkin on this domain, ever.  Thus there will never be any cookies left behind or forwarded and no unexpected associations.

Note: thanks to Elliott​ I'll be giving a talk on topics like this at the next New York MUG.  Maybe you could suggest I come up for Boston too!

[James_Glavin]

Fantastic - thanks Sandford and Elliot for your input! Sandford - your expertise would be very welcome in Boston!

[Rachel_Egan]

Hi James Glavin, have you implemented this? My team was looking for a similar solution and I wanted to see what kinds of unforeseen consequences you may have seen after implementation, or if it's working well for you. Any insight is helpful!

[James_Glavin]

Hi Rachel,

We did implement this, and it seems to be working OK for us! If you want to take a look at the source code of the page we use it on, it's: http://pages.acis.com/localreps.html

Our web developer implemented this for me, so if you have any technical questions, I'm happy to put you in touch with him, but I can say that it seems to be working without a problem so far.

James

[Dan_Stevens_]

We use the approach discussed here (where Sanford also was instrumental in solving for us):

Non-trackable landing page is still identifying me

In summary, a single line of code to empty the munchkin cookie within the LP template; and then a simple script (simpler than the one referenced here) placed within the actual LP.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Dan - that does look like a cleaner solution. Is this the code that ended up working, from your original post in that thread, albeit replacing the windown.location.host with your own domain?

<!-- CREATE EMPTY MUNCHKIN COOKIE - TO ESENTIALLY MAKE THE PAGE UNTRACKABLE -->

  <script>document.cookie = "_mkto_trk=;path=/;domain="+window.location.host+";expires=0"</script>

<!-- END -->

<!-- Clear the Marketo tracking cookie value on submission of the form, without having to delete the cookie itself from the user’s browser. -->

  <script>

//add a callback to the first ready form on the page

MktoForms2.whenReady( function(form){

    //add the tracking field to be submitted

        form.addHiddenFields({"_mkt_trk":""});

        //clear the value during the onSubmit event to prevent tracking association

    form.onSubmit( function(form){

        form.vals({"_mkt_trk":""});

    })

})

</script>

<!-- END -->

[Dan_Stevens_]

Yes.  The first three lines of code above are what is contained within the LP template.  We then created a code snippet using the js code that is then dragged onto our LPs (traditional ones, not guided)