Do Marketo forms work behind Chinese firewall?

[Stephen_Jeong1]

Hello,

Does anybody know if Marketo forms work properly behind the Chinese firewall? We plan on using a domain from within China so that we aren't blocked by their firewall but we are wondering if Marketo forms and landing pages will work properly in that situation.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Is there an update on this? I have heard of data loss due to the firewall. Even with a Chinese-hosted CDN for dynamic content, there are calls that need to leave the firewall. So, even if it seems that things are working you might be losing 2 or 3 out of every 10 leads/form submissions and not realize this because you are getting 70% or 80% of them.

We are looking to host a site in China and are being proposed alternative, Chinese-specific tracking but then that takes our flow out of Marketo and affects lead transfer.

We need to understand data loss of Marketo forms on this site from lead submission (user and site in China, but not Marketo) to appearing in Marketo.

What is Marketo's data loss  over the Great Firewall of China?

[Anonymous]

We use akamai CDN in China to deliver content and have no problems with the firewall.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jamie - forgive my ignorance.  How do you leverage Akamai CDN in China when your instance of Marketo is not?  Can you explain? Maybe this is something I can research to solve my performance issues.

Thanks in advance for any info.

Kristen

[Kenny_Elkington]

The CDN mirrors assets and proxies requests from inside mainland China, improving performance and increasing availability.

[Anonymous]

Kenny Elkington​ can you clarify if there's something we need to do to make sure we are leveraging Akamai in China behind the GF? I assume Marketo utilizes it to maximize performance behind the GF. Is there something we need to do to ensure our instance is using this CDN? We have just learned that our Chinese office can only access our landing pages when using a VPN.

[Kenny_Elkington]

This is probably something you should work with Support on.  I haven't dealt with these sorts of access issues directly in quite some time.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Hi Stephen

we've been using full Marketo functionality (forms, lp's etc) in China for over 5 years now and never had any issues with the firewall. As long as you are not publishing any politically sensitive content, there shouldn't be any problems

Bests

Iryna

[Anonymous]

Hi Iryna - My team in Singapore supports our marketers in China.  We are finding that email delivery is generally reliable in China but as of this week we are having an issue with Landing Page access.  When clicking from an Email to the Landing Page - when the Click to our Landing page (interact.f5.com) redirects to buzz.f5.com.  the landing Page is blocked.  Are you experiencing anything like this recently. I have opened a ticket with Marketo but I'm not sure i will get any help because the issue can only be replicated from within China.

I would appreciate any perspective or experience you can relay.  Regards,

Kristen Petersen

Director, Marketing Operations

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Hi Kristen, we ran into the same issue with landing pages you described, this started happening a few days ago, did Marketo support provide any solution for you so far?

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Hi Kristen, I discussed this issue with our marketing team in China yesterday, and they did not notice anything like that, the only recent issue we've noticed in China is that when you click a link in the email, it might take a while, up to 20-30 seconds to get redirected to the actual page you were trying to open. Let me know what suport says about your problem, thank you for sahring this

[SanfordWhiteman]

Kristen, do you see this problem if you add the class "mktNoTrack" to your links, i.e. bypassing the JavaScript redirect?

[Stephen_Jeong1]

Thanks Inya.

So you've never had leads mention that they can't download your assets?

We host our whitepapers in Marketo and so when a lead fills out a form, they are directed to the Marketo URL to view/download the whitepaper. But my marketing manager in China just sent me a message saying that some of the leads are saying that they can't download the asset.

Does that sound familiar at all?

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Hi Stephen,

never experienced anything like that with whitepapers, the only thing I can think of is that we did have a problem with some of the videos hosted on non-Chinese platforms not playing or playing extremely slow in China. We switched to hosting them on Ali Cloud to solve this problem - 阿里云-打造数据分享第一平台

You can potentially use Ali Cloud servers to host other files you are having problems with in China, their service is pretty great.

I still find it strange that only some of your whitepapers are not available, usually if they blacklist you, none of your content should be available.

Let me know if that helps!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Did you try class="mktNoTrack" to isolate the problem?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Did you check the download URL at some of the Chinese firewall lookup sites?

What is the URL of the form so we can look at it?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Even if you run a web server in China, your Marketo forms will not be posting to the China side of the Great Firewall (I think you may understand that already).

Our Mkto LPs and forms hosted in California are currently accessible from mainland China and I don't think we've had a problem in the last couple of years. But this could certainly change, since the GF constantly augments its content rules.  If they tag something subversive on a given Mkto page, other tenants on that same instance naturally would be punished as well.  That said, as long as www.marketo.com is available​ that's a good sign.

[Anonymous]

Stephen Jeong​

FYI: Moving to Products and Support because this is more of a product related questions