Create Smart list of people who viewed specific web page before first form fill/person creation

[CW11]

Hi, I'm wondering how I can create a smart list of people who viewed a specific page or group of pages (based on "URL contains:...") before they filled out their first form and were created in our system. As far as I can tell, I can add filters for "Viewed page" and "Person created" and select timelines for each, but if I do that, I'll capture people who viewed the page after being created. I want there to be a relationship between the two filters, where I'm only seeing people who were created after viewing the specific page. Can anyone help? 

[Darshil_Shah1]

In simple words you cannot create smart list of your anonymous web page visitors. The only way is that you can track anonymous users who have visited your webpage under the Web Page Activity reports (there will be many data available about the anonymous user like inferred country, state, ISP, IP etc.). Also for an anonymous user who visited the lp there will be a lead record created with a id (you can get the leadid of the anonymous user in the webpage activity report), but the record will not be visible in the lead database as the record is still anonymous record without the email address. Since the record is anonymous you will not be able to run the Smart Campaigns/Create Smart List on this record until it becomes a known record in the system (e.g. through a form fill-out) even if this anonymous person visits your webpage.

First Image shows the anonymous record in the  webpage activity report and the second image shows the anonymous lead created with lead id 1010048 (note that as stated earlier this lead would not be available in your marketable lead database).

[SanfordWhiteman]

OP is trying to look at sessions that are now associated, not still anonymous.

In other words, in the same Munchkin session, if somebody visited Page P1 and then filled out Form F1 on Page P2, then the Visit Web Page, was chronologically earlier than the Filled Out Form. Both are in the same Activity Log. And this is different from filling out Form F1 on Page P2, then visiting Page P1.

[CW11]

Yes, exactly! Any ideas on how I can do this?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, there are multiple issues standing between you and this goal.

One is indirectly touched on in Darshil's reply, which is that if someone visited that page in a session other than the one where they filled out the form, you won't know about that activity until later (if ever) when it's associated with lead via other means. But that might be a minor concern.

The more major problem is that Marketo does distinguish once-anonymous, now-merged events in the Activity Log UI, but you can't constrain on this property ("Anonymous Triggering Deferred") in a Smart List. 

You could stamp a DateTime field when they visited one of your interesting pages, and then stamp another DateTime field when they fill out the form. This is the way I would do it, but it requires a webhook to compare the 2 dates, since you can't do the cross-token comparison directly in the Smart Campaign.

You might experiment with simply flipping a flag (Boolean) when the interesting pages are visited, and then check whether that field is true when they fill out a form. However, I believe this logic has a race condition and the deferred data updates are not guaranteed to happen in sequence (before the form fillout is processed). 

Yet another approach, since you're tracking the same Munchkin session anyway, is just to store whether they visited an interesting page in a cookie, on the client side, then add that to a hidden field on the form. 

Another far more complex method is to extract the Activity Logs, which would have guaranteed success... but is a much bigger ball of wax. 🙂

[CW11]

Well, that's unfortunate. Appreciate the thorough answer though!

[SanfordWhiteman]

It is possible, though - the JS option is easy to put in place.

[CW11]

I don't think I do need to track anonymous people though because everyone I'm trying to pull up on the list will be someone who has submitted a form.