Does Marketo track Redirects to External Pages?

[Anonymous]

Hi Community,

We have set up a landing page in Marketo that redirects to an external landing page, an article that our company is featured on.

We basicaly want to be able to see how many people have viewed this landing page, and we also want to potentially create triggered campaigns based off of this action.

So far, it seems that Marketo does not pick up whether a person visits our Marketo landing page.

Firstly, is it true that Marketo does not track visits to landing pages that are built in Marketo and that redirect to an external page? If so, then secondly, is there a workaround?

Hoi

[John_Clark1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Hoi,

The munchkin code on Marketo pages can't log a Visits Webpage Activity if the page/code doesn't fully load.  Redirects don't allow the page to fully load, so a workaround would be to have the page fully load, but use a script that will redirect the page after 5 or 6 seconds.  This allows the visit to be logged, while still redirecting the lead automatically.

John

[Anonymous]

Thanks, John. Super helpful.

I don't have much coding experience, at least not when it comes to redirect scripts. Do you have a script I could look at by any chance?

Hoi

[John_Clark1]

I'm sorry, I don't.  We don't keep samples on hand, but I googled "redirect script" and came up with a few hits, and I'd bet some of our other users here in the community could assist.  Sanford Whiteman​, any suggestions here?

John

[Anonymous]

Found the script below and it works--Marketo now picks up the Visit Web Page.

<script>
  setTimeout(function(){
  window.location='form2.html';
   }, 5000);
</script>

The "5000" equals 5 seconds. If anyone else is reading this and uses this script, I would just edit the 5000 to extend/reduce the amount of time before redirect. Looks like 1000 is 1 second.

Thanks for the insight, John!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I really, really would not advise doing it this way. Anytime you're thinking, "that's probably long enough" you should rethink your options. In browsers, timeouts should be used for self-contained events -- like "change the background after 2 minutes" -- rather than attempts to guess-coordinate separate events.

In this case, while there are more elegant solutions, a quick way to fire a more reliable event is to use a synthetic clickLink before you redirect:

     Munchkin.init('aaa-bbb-ccc',{clickTime:5000});

     Munchkin.munchkinFunction('clickLink',{href:'form.html'});

     document.location = 'form.html';

clickLink is synchronous by default so it will block before redirecting -- but up to 5 seconds as opposed to always delaying for 5s. You'll trigger on the Click Link event.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sanford,

Thanks for the insight on a safer option to fire the munchkin code with redirect. I'm not sure how to use the code you shared here though - is this to be used in a custom html block? or in the head tags on the page?

Best,

RJ