Difference between Referrer constraint vs Web Page constraint for form fill out?

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Hi all, what is the difference between Referrer and Web Page as constraints on the fills out form trigger?

We have been using the trigger Fills Out Form (ID 0000) with the constraint Web Page is (www.abc.xyz) for over a year without any major issues. However, we discovered last week that two of these triggers were failing to qualify leads consistently. There were 100+ leads who sat in Marketo without qualifying for these two triggers they were supposed to qualify for. Meanwhile, another 100+ leads were qualifying for these two triggers without any issue. There was no difference in their behaviors or form fill out activity, so our team was stumped and Marketo support was stumped.

The official Marketo support suggestion is to swap the trigger constraint to Referrer is (www.abc.xyz) instead of Web Page. They say the constraint for Web Page is really only for Marketo landing pages and we use Wordpress, so they cannot guarantee it will work.

My unanswered, follow up questions are:

-Why is this suddenly an issue? We've created hundreds of campaigns using this trigger with the Web Page is constraint without major issues until now. These two triggers are the only ones we had this issue with.

-Why does it seem to work for some leads?

-What is the actual difference between these two constraints? 

Thanks all,

Liliana

[Anonymous]

How do you use Marketo forms in WordPress right now?

Are you embedding Marketo froms within WordPress page?

or

are you using any WordPress plugin?

or

Are you using iframe?

or

Are you 'loading' Marketo forms using Forms 2.0 javascript call?

Is there any URL you can share?

This sort of information can be useful to be able to help effectively.

Rajesh

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Hi Rajesh Talele​, the forms are embedded via JS. The munchkin is via Google Tag Manager. I'll message you with one of the URLs.

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Hey Rajesh, I can't message you directly. Could you either follow me or share your email address so I can send you one of the URLs? Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I followed you. Anyway, my email address is Rajesh@BrightAspects.com

Rajesh

[SanfordWhiteman]

Are the URLs not public URLs?  If we don't see them here, it will obscure the solution for other Community users.

[Dan_Stevens_]

We use this same approach across hundreds of our programs.  Since we use a common form on our gated content pages (on our website, not Marketo LPs), we need to constrain this by the landing page, e.g.:

I just checked some active campaigns and it's working fine.  I've never heard that the constraint for "Web Page is" is only for Marketo landing pages.

[SanfordWhiteman]

-Why is this suddenly an issue?

-Why does it seem to work for some leads?

-What is the actual difference between these two constraints?

Without looking at your actual URLs, I can't say whether anything unexpected happened.  But I agree with Support that Referrer is the preferred constraint for embedded forms.

This is not to say that Web Page does not also work, but for non-Marketo URLs it enforces an exact match on the hostname+pathname+hash, which is not so for Marketo LPs  For example, the constraint

     Web Page [is] s.example.com/mypage.html

will match

     http://s.example.com/mypage.html?qs=1

but it will not match

     http://s.example.com/mypage.html?qs=1#0AEDC

Contrast this with a constraint by Marketo LP friendly name

     Web Page [is] My Landing Page 02

which will match

     http://s.example.com/lp02

     http://s.example.com/lp02.html

     http://s.example.com/lp02.html#0AEDC

     http://s.anotherlandingpagedomain.com/lp02.html

and will also match if you change the URL.

In other words, even though it's expressed as an [is] match, with a Marketo LP it's flexible across branding domains and hashes.

Referrer, on the other hand, treats the entire referrer URL as an opaque string and allows for partial matches. So

     Referrer [starts with] http://s.example.ccom

will not match

    https://s.example.com/mypage.html

while

     Referrer [contains] mypage.html

will match

     http://s.example.com/mypage.html

     http://s.example.net/deeplinks/mypage.html

They both have their uses, but I don't find an exact page match without the query string to be something I run into too often.  More often I want to catch a certain form across an entire domain, or the query string itself, or something within the path (like a language).

[Dan_Stevens_]

This is good to know, Sandy.  Like I said, this is the first I heard of this - and after looking at some sample activity log entries, it makes sense.  It's the referrer URL that's being captured on form submission, not the web page that it's embedded on.  Good to know for future reference.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Sanford Whiteman​, there's one scenario that you didn't illustrate:

Referrer [is] s.example.com/mypage.html

will it match a URL containing a URL parameter?

     http://s.example.com/mypage.html?qs=1

Similarly, when we use "LINK is" for a "clicks link in web page" trigger, that Marketo only evaluates the base URL without the URL parameters (unless you add in a "query string" constraint).