Form Submits and Issues with Over-writing Data Provided by Initial Responder

[Tom_Kerlin2]

Hi all,

We plan on building a registration landing page for upcoming event, but we were concerned about the potential risks involved when invitees decide to forward the invitation email or registration landing page to someone else. In an earlier campaign this seemed to be a problem, since when the new invitee would register it would over-write the information provided by the initial responder. How does this impact cookies or tracking of leads? Is this also why it's not advised to have someone complete a form to register somebody else for an event?

Thanks,

Tom

[Anonymous]

Hi Tom,

You can use forward to friend Functionality token, it creates a new lead and the initial responder doesn't get effected as we have used it in our system. Don't know about the problem in the past.

Thanks

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You don't need to use Forward to Friend (which is hideous and isn't right for this context, anyway).  You simply need to follow referral form guidelines, including clearing the Munchkin cookie temporarily during form submission. We've got a lot of Marketo forms used for referrals in the wild and they perform swimmingly.

[Tom_Kerlin2]

Thanks! Is there an article on referral form guidelines you could point me to as well?

[Tom_Kerlin2]

Should I be taking this snippet of code (clearing the Munchkin cookie temporarily during form submission ) and create a snippet out of it, or will I need to add to landing page template itself?

[Tom_Kerlin2]

If your email link to the form includes tracking, and the lead forwards their email that has the tracked link, the cookie from the original recipient of the email will still be passed to the forward recipient when they land on the landing page.

Marketo offers a mktNoTrack setting in the email link editor when you add the link to an email. Here is a link to the Marketo product document that shows you how to do this:
http://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Disable+Tracking+for+an+Email+Link

 
If the link does not contain tracking, the 2nd person who clicks on the link will be cookied as a different user.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, "the cookie from the original recipient" isn't the right terminology. It's actually the mkt_tok query parameter from the original, forwarding recipient that you're trying to not pass all the way through to the forwarded recipient.

mktNoTrack is a very risky feature because it means neither email clicks nor subsequent web activities will be tracked. In practice, the only time I ever use mktNoTrack is when a link will not function at all if it bounces off the tracking server, like with mailto: links.

mktNoTok willl credit the original recipient with any email click, but by not appending the mkt_tok it will prevent a previously unassociated anonymous lead from being associated with that recipient for subsequent web activities. However, this will also prevent the true original recipient's session from being associated, since they're (obviously) being presented with the same link.  You can't have it both ways.

The case you describe is actually different from a pure referral form because you want the original recipient to be associated when the current recipient == original recipient.  While If the current recipient self-identifies as a different person, you want that new lead's info to be associated with their web activities.  In fact, both of these scenarios work automatically!  But the devil is in the third scenario: when someone follows the auto-associating link but doesn't fill out a form to switch their known identity.

[Tom_Kerlin2]

If these scenarios work automatically, does that mean that I shouldn't insert the snippet of code you suggested earlier?

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you're willing to accept that the 3rd scenario may happen, you don't have to add any Forms 2.0 API code.