How to identify who was a "known" person who bypassed the form in a smart list?

[Danielle_Wong]

I have gated content forms that are hidden to known visitors. However, these still appear as form fills in activity logs and triggers that look for the form fills. How can I create a smart list of people who actually filled out the form vs those who were known and automatically accessed the gated content?

[dillonlee02]

You could run a report looking at their acquisition program and see if you acquired any net new leads via this program, vs a known user who has filled out a form prior (probably acquired from another program) and has their cookies enabled. Does that make sense, or I hope what I shared is a bit helpful in your search for a solution?

[Darshil_Shah1]

Umm - good idea @dillonlee02, but this trick will only work if @Danielle_Wong has proper set up to capture the acquisition programs for the forms/assets globally created (if they have global forms in DS). I'm little afraid about form submissions for the known audience and would probably love to explore options around setting up the forms on the website in a better way - like the forms should not get submitted for the known people in the first place IMO. Also @Danielle_Wong, do you use form prefill for the known people - so that existing info w/o any updates essentially gets submitted in the back-end to Marketo?

[dillonlee02]

Could you implement a new field on your form and implement progressive profiling? That way anyone who was known (who had all the fields filled out prior) will have to fill out the new field, and then anyone who wasn't known wouldn't have been able to fill out the new field until they fill out the other fields that are being asked of in the progressive profiling stages? Just another thought. Sorry if this isn't helpful.

[SanfordWhiteman]

---

I'm little afraid about form submissions for the known audience and would probably love to explore options around setting up the forms on the website in a better way - like the forms should not get submitted for the known people in the first place IMO.

---

Why would you say that?

If you don’t track the form submission (in it’s case just a button click, which results in a Filled Out Form under the hood) you won’t be able to see the surrounding context of a download — stored UTM params, etc.

If you’re driving people to a page, you may wish to ungate the content if they’re already known. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want to attribute the download in the same way you would if they were anonymous.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Yeah - you're correct Sandy! I should have rather said and meant that the form should not get submitted for the known people in the first place "exactly in the similar way that it does for the anonymous people".

[Danielle_Wong]

Similarly, I actually think known "form fills" should not appear as form fill. To me the act of filling out a form includes knowingly seeing form fields and a submit button click. For known users, they don't see any of that, and so they essentially don't even realize they are "submitting" a form into Marketo. And in my opinion, they really are not completing a form. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

---

For known users, they don't see any of that, and so they essentially don't even realize they are "submitting" a form into Marketo. And in my opinion, they really are not completing a form.

---

Perhaps? But you’re implicitly posting hundreds of forms across all manner of sites just by clicking a button. For example, a “Update” button that sends an XMLHttpRequest to fetch results can be exactly the same (on the wire) as posting a form. It’s just a form that’s one big button and everything else is a hidden field.

I agree that it might be better if there were something appended to the activity, like Filled Out Form (from KV HTML)  and if there were a boolean field you could constrain on in Smart Lists (KV HTML=true).

[Danielle_Wong]

I like this thought, Dillon. We do not consistently utilize the acquisition program field though. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Surprisingly, there’s no built-in way to use Smart List filters to distinguish Known Visitor HTML form submits from “true” form submits.

Dillon’s suggestion of looking at those who were created by/acquired by a form vs. those who already were in the db when they filled out the form is a good one. But it’s incomplete: someone could still not be known in a given browser/device session, so they’d see and fill out the entire form even though they will not be created by the form.

If you look at the details of the Filled Out Form activity, you can see a difference: if you have hidden fields added from UTM params, cookies, etc. those won’t be present if the KV HTML was shown. But that’s kind of a bug, so I’ve posted code to work around it. Once you work around it, the Filled Out Form-s will be indistinguishable again! What you can then do is have a separate hidden field expressly for this purpose, like isKVHTML, and populate that hidden field only in KV HTML mode. Then you can see isKVHTML=yes in the log. But still not in at the Smart List level.