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

[beth-corby]

Referrer (in Marketo) = the URL of the page where the form lives and was submitted, even on non-Marketo pages like WordPress. Surprisingly, it is the more reliable constraint for embedded forms.

Web Page = only works consistently when the form is filled out on a Marketo-hosted landing page. This field is often blank or misreported when forms are embedded on external pages due to how Marketo tracks its assets vs. external environments.

To your specific questions:

• Why this is an issue now? This may be due to a recent change in how your WordPress pages load the embed code, a plugin or theme update, or browser privacy.

• Why some leads qualify and others don’t? Different browsers, ad blockers, privacy settings, or how fast the script loads can impact whether Marketo captures the “Web Page” info accurately.

• Why Referrer works better? On non-Marketo pages, Referrer ends up being the best proxy for “where the form was filled out” because it's populated based on how the JavaScript embed is interpreted, whereas Web Page expects a Marketo-hosted environment.

Let me know if this helps. I was quite surprised when I found this out too. 😀

[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).

[bugcrowd1]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman I want to clarify as I am getting mixed information across community and from support.

We are trying to use the Fills Out Form trigger (with global form) but on specific non-MKTO web pages so that we can give appropriate attribution. What constraints should we use? What if we use utm parameters and how would that tie into the contains, starts with, etc.

I thought that referer was the page BEFORE a form fill but that may not be the case for the fills out form trigger (rather the visits web page referrer).

[SanfordWhiteman]

The Referrer of a form fill is the page the form was on.

This is because Marketo treats the form referrer as if it were an IFRAME (even though, thankfully, it’s not) and the referrer of an IFRAME is always the parent page, not the page before it.

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Thanks Sanford Whiteman. Your explanation makes sense for the most part.

The form was split up into a multi-step form, so each step appended #step-1 to the URL. This is relatively new for us, so that's probably why we hadn't seen this issue previously. The other versions of our multi-step forms have triggers based on the form ID alone without any other constraints, and that's why we don't see this issue for those trigger campaigns.

It still throws me off that there were some leads who had the #step-4 referrer url and still qualified for the trigger (form ID+Web Page constraint). But since there are inconsistencies, I won't be relying on this constraint anymore.

I've since built a patch campaign to wait 5 minutes after leads fill out the form + referrer then go through the necessary flow steps if it hasn't already, and it seems to be working. After monitoring for a few days, all leads are going through the patch campaign without issue so it does seem like referrer is the better constraint for non-Marketo LPs.

Lesson learned. (Is this noted in the product docs already?)

[SanfordWhiteman]

The form was split up into a multi-step form, so each step appended #step-1 to the URL. This is relatively new for us, so that's probably why we hadn't seen this issue previously.

I had a gut feeling it was the hash that was causing confusion.  I like to exploit the hash-awareness in other contexts w/Marketo, so I keep an eye out for it.  Switching to Referrer will both solve this problem and give you more flexibility in the future.

[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).

[SanfordWhiteman]

Referrer does consider the entire URL, including query string.

[Dan_Stevens_]

In that case, if we have a central campaign landing page that's used across multiple channels - meaning there could be all sorts of combinations of UTM parameters attached to the URL, resulting in 25+ URLs - the best approach would then be to use a "referrer" [CONTAINS] "http://mainURL.com" contraint, correct?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yep!

[Elliott_Lowe1]

'Referrer starts with' would also work and may be slightly faster.

If your base URL is the same for all channels and the only differences in the links are the query parameters, you should be able to use a 'Web Page is' constraint.  The key with the Web Page constraint is it must exactly match the base URL including trailing slashes (or not) and hashes.  You can typically see the base URL (not including www.domain.xxx) in the Webpage URL field of a Visit Web Page activity for that page (screen shot below). You can also see the Webpage ID field value in the Visit Web Page activity, which should match the Webpage ID field value in the Fill Out Form activity. 

If your page has sections, you will need to add the base URL and the base URL with its hash values in the multiple value chooser field as in the following examples.

• www.domain.xxx/products/mobile-sdk/trial/
• www.domain.xxx/products/mobile-sdk/trial/#partners

[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_]

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.

[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]

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.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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

[Anonymous]

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

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.