Custom Lead Id and Marketo ID mapping?

[Anonymous]

Hey all!

I have a question regarding lead ids. Currently, we generate a custom id for anonymous users, through our social widgets or through our admin UI. We just implemented Marketo, and while Segment allows us to track Admin UI activity once they submit their email address, there is a possibility that users won't submit a form for a while, and we will lose interesting user data.

Has anyone encountered this challenge? If so, is there a way to better map custom ids to lead ids, or force a custom id to anonymous users?

Thanks!

[Josh_Hill13]

I am pretty sure you would have to do this with an external system and custom code that taps into the Anonymous functions of munchkin or another tracking pixel.

Marketo can't know about a Lead if it's anonymous until it fills out a form and ties that Anon ID to the Email. I know it may be possible to do more with Adobe or some other tools.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You don't "lose" any data gathered before the Munchkin session is associated. It will move from the anonymous lead to the named lead upon association.

If you want the data to be logged to a named lead before you know the lead's email address, you can use your unique ID as a placeholder for the email address.

But I'm not really clear on what you're going for.

[Anonymous]

Hey Sanford! I was able to verify that we don't lose any info gathered from the munchkin session before they make themselves known. The issues is that we already use our own Custom ID to identify people in our databases. So if a lead signs up for a newsletter, then is looking at the Admin UI for a period of 2 weeks before filling out another form, that info won't populate on the lead until they commit that action. One option would be to make our "custom id" the Marketo munchkin id, so we wouldn't have this problem, but I wanted to see if there was a less invasive way to do this. For example, if we were able to let Marketo know that a lead with a certain value mapped to the Munchkin lead id?

Does that make sense at all?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Making your lead ID the same as the cookie value wouldn't help, because the lead will still be anonymous.

You have to associate the Munchkin session with a named lead. That can be done using Munchkin API associateLead, form fillout, or a couple of other methods (which are not recommended due to limite capacity).

The lead create/update/associate key is the Email field by default, but the Email need not be an actual email address -- it can be a placeholder until you know their address.

Note that whenever you associate a session with a lead, by definition that means there's a lead in your database counting against your limit (even if not emailable at first). It's still a handy technique for when you're sure the current session belongs to a human you know about elsewhere, you're just not sure which human it is yet.