How do you store and track info on what a user downloads?

[Anonymous]

Hi Marketo Community,

I'm reaching out to see if anyone has a solution for tracking a reocurring visitor who visits your site to download one piece of content, then comes back to download multiple pieces of content at later time or possibly does everything in the same session.

i.e. The user fills out a registration form one time and as long as the cookie is dropped and still in their computer, they can visit the site without having to re-enter their name which gives them full access to multiple pieces of content.

We would like to track who downloaded what content and when.

What are some of the ways you have captured this in Marketo?

Thanks in advance.





 

[Anonymous]

This is helpful. Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, you have to figure out how best to maintain one-to-many records in the Marketo database.

Clicked Link events are inherently one-to-many, scalable, and reportable (you can see all the click events for a given Lead or across all).

Some people use "history" fields where they append or prepend the most recent data for another field (and usually empty the current value of the field).  This gives the impression of one-to-many, and the field is stored directly on the lead, but I generally wouldn't advise that unless it's absolutely necessary.  Marketo remains oblivious to the fact you're trying to keep a series of data points in the same field -- logging timestamps in the history just is more freeform text you have to search on -- etc.

You can also bubble up important clicks as Interesting Moments, which are of course also one-to-many.

Yet another mechanism is to auto-submit a form so the download is logged as a Filled Out Form.

In the absence of an activity actually called Downloaded File I'd go with the Clicked Link, especially since it is probably already being logged!

[Anonymous]

Thank you for replying. We initially wanted to pass the name of the PDF or content to be stored into a field(s) in a profile so we can see all the content someone downloaded, but tracking clicked link events is something for us to explore.

[SanfordWhiteman]

If your site is loading the Munchkin tracking code, then all those downloads will be registered as Clicked Link events on the Lead.  What else are you looking for?