Fix a mis-cookied lead

[Anonymous]

Hello all,

As my company has begun using Marketo for events, our sales team has sent along emails with names of clients that would like to register and our events coordinator went ahead and registered these people before I could realize what was happening and the consequences.
 

Now we have a lot of leads that are "mis-cookied." As in, they are cookied to our events coordinator's IP address and her web activity is showing up as if it belonged to these leads.

Has anyone else dealt with this? How can I clearly explain that we cannot do this in the future? And, most importantly, how can I fix this?

Thanks!
Emily

[Anonymous]

We are having the same issue.  Subscribing for any insight!  Thanks.

[Anonymous]

It sounds as though the event coordinator used a Marketo form to register those leads, as opposed to directly importing the list into Marketo.  Is that correct?

[Anonymous]

You got it, Evan. I've since explained the process of just changing their progression status in Marketo and that is how this will be handled in the future. 

But the "mis-cookie-ing" happened because she (or the account owner) would go to the registration landing page and fill out the form for the lead. Now I'm tasked with (and struggling to) determine how we're going to fix it.

Very interested to hear suggestions!

Thanks,
Emily

[Anonymous]

Well, the only person mis-cookied right now is the Event Coordinator.  Any leads she added will be cookied when the lead themselves fill out a form or click a tracked link in an email.  So, it sounds like no harm done except polluting her own activity log, since these leads would not have been cookied without them engaging your content with their browser.  Do you need to perform additional actions to the leads she registered?

[Anonymous]

What I'm seeing is that the leads she registered have her activities in their activity log. We have one lead that's up to over 200 page views because he is cookied to someone in our marketing department... 

When she registers these clients, she puts in their name, their email, etc. so that they will receive the auto-responder telling them that they are registered.

Does that make more sense? If her activity log was polluted, I wouldn't mind a bit. But the way it stands now, I keep getting false lead alerts about clients doing things that they're not really doing...

I guess that as long as we get them to click a link or fill out a form, the problem would be solved - now getting them to do one of these things will be the challenge...

Thanks,
Emily

[Anonymous]

Emily:  We are having the same issue with only one of our leads, we believe his activity is actually someone in the Marketing department as it is happening quite often and I highly doubt he is on the website as much as it is saying he is.  Something got crossed as well.  So I am interested to find out how to clear up this issue. 

Thanks!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Yes, the way to prevent this is to have the employees who are using Marketo forms to clear their cookies.  Even placing just an email on a Marketo form ensures that you get cookied as the lead with that email.  Do the employees using the Marketo forms have access to Marketo or Salesforce?  

If you absolutely must do this through web forms, you will need to follow the instructions on setting up a Form Proxy here: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L51cCAC

I don't recommend this, as you'd need a different proxy for each form you don't want to track, and this is a custom code solution that requires web hosting with PHP on your side.  Although, if you do choose to go this route, don't add Munchkin code to the Form Proxy page.

Preferably, your marketers and sales reps will use changes in Marketo or Salesforce directly to register leads into programs.

[Anonymous]

Erin - that is exactly the problem we're having. I highly doubt that one of our current clients has been on our website 200+ times...

Evan - this all sounds good. I'll have these marketers and AEs clear their cookies and attempt to re-cookie the leads. In the future I will certainly work to ensure that we do not "help out" by registering clients in this way and that we just change their progression status within the program in Marketo. It's not an issue with SFDC because we do not have it.

The form proxy is a good suggestion, but I know that we would never have the time to implement, and really, we should be working harder to force clients to register themselves and not say, "no problem, we can register you."

Thanks,

Emily

[Anonymous]

Yes, that's what great marketing is all about, getting the leads to do the work for you!

Don't worry about re-cookie-ing (?) the leads, the leads' browser will still have their cookie which will log to the appropriate record.