How does Marketo handle tracking with forwarded emails?

Anonymous
Not applicable

How does Marketo handle tracking with forwarded emails?

We have a SFDC Contact at a company who has a cookie and his web page visits are being tracked.  We also have a SFDC Lead at the same company who also has a cookie and his web page visits are being tracked.  We sent an webinar invitation email to the Lead, but not to the Contact.  The Lead record has a click email activity in the Activity Log, but no corresponding visit web page activity.  Instead, the Contact record has the visit web page activity logged at the same time, but it has no click email activity prior to that.  A few hours after the visit web page activity, the Contact has a fill out form activity (webinar registration) and a subsequent visit web page activity (registration confirmation page).  The Lead record had no more visit web page activities logged until the next morning when there was a click email activity and a subsequent visit web page activity .

It looks like the Lead forwarded the email he received to the Contact (not using Forward to Friend link) and the Contact clicked the link in the email.  I expected that the click email activity would be logged in the Lead's record since the tracking code on the link points to the Lead record, but I was surprised that the visit web page activity was logged into the Contact's record.  My understanding is that when a link is clicked that has tracking code on it, the Marketo tracking cookie is updated to point to the record that corresponds to the tracking code on the link (i.e. the original email recipient).  Does Marketo not update an existing cookie to point to a different lead record in this situation?
Tags (1)
2 REPLIES 2
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: How does Marketo handle tracking with forwarded emails?

Hey Elliott,

My understanding of the cookies would agree with your results. It sounds like the email was forwarded from the Lead to the Cotnact (as you suggest), which means that the link is cookied for the Lead. But as soon as the Contact hit your website, then it's own cookie took over and the behavior was registered for the Contact. 

We had a situation with this awhile back when my manager forwarded an email sent to her. Whomever she forwarded it to then unsubscribed. That unsubscribe was attributed to my manager, not the uncookied person she forwarded it to. Not an apples to apples comparison, but to me this means that if you have a cookie, it will not change in this type of situation.
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: How does Marketo handle tracking with forwarded emails?

Thanks Jeff,  I've also noticed though that if a salesperson clicks a link that has tracking code for a lead (e.g in a reply to an email we sent), the lead starts having the salesperson's activity logged into their record, so in that case it appears that the cookie on the salesperson's PC is updated to point to the lead. 

I hope that Marketo will provide a definitive answer about this, so we can better understand and manage situations like this.