Hi -- we have a B2B freemium product with our sign up and sign in processes managed in a home-grown system that isn't Marketo. Then, we push the resulting signups into Marketo via API in order to market to them. The sign-up and sign-in pages both already have Munchkin cookies placed on them, however those cookies aren't associated with the email addresses collected on sign-up / sign-in. We want to make that association happen.
What's the best way to do this, in terms of how we ask our developer / engineer to store the Munchkin cookie and pass it (I assume via API?) back into Marketo associated with an email address?
The goal is to be able to track the website activity (e.g. visits to pricing page) for people who have signed up for the product, in addition to remarketing / email customization to people differently based on website activity. This will turns a large portion of our website visitors from unknown to known.
Thanks a lot.
This is a quite fragile setup.
In order to do this using the REST API, you must consume yet another API call to the Associate Lead endpoint for every inbound form post. This leaves your service 2x as open to a Denial of Service attack.
I overwhelmingly recommend you switch to using the client-side Marketo Forms JS API to post your form data to Marketo, not the server-side REST API.
Glad to change our process if there's a right answer that doesn't change the customer experience / UX -- Do you mind explaining a bit more how that would work (or linking to something to read on it)? Sorry for the potentially naive question.
Here's a simplified blog post on the topic: http://developers.marketo.com/blog/make-a-marketo-form-submission-in-the-background/
You should be able to integrate a Forms API-based submission into any custom form. The only time it gets complicated is when people try to use another wholly different forms library. Some of those libraries don't fire an appropriate "I'm about to to submit" type of event. Any totally custom form can do that, though.
Hi Sanford, I work with Zack. Thanks for your help thus far. We implemented the background based on that blog post, but it is not tracking in Marketo unfortunately. The Marketo pixel is tracking on other forms, just not this hidden form specifically. Any idea what could be going on?
Need your URL.
You rock, Sanford! https://console.fieldwire.net/#!/auth/register is the product registration page we put the hidden form onto and are trying to make work, and www.fieldwire.com is the main company page.
You aren't loading Munchkin on that site. Hence, while the form data is forwarded to Marketo on the next pageview, the Munchkin cookie doesn't exist to be sent to Marketo and associate the session: