Lead Tokens on a Confirmation Page – On24-Related Question

[Owen_Millard1]

We use On24 as our webinar provider and are having a little bit of difficulty implementing some aspects of its configuration.

Promoting live webinars seemingly works fine, but for on-demand webinars (in which case users are sent directly into the recording, and do not need to download any desktop client), we're noticing the creation of a bunch of blank records.

Following On24's recommendation for their clients who want to use Marketo landing pages, the experience registering for an on-demand webinar is as follows:

1. User lands on the registration page
2. User fills out a form
3. User lands on confirmation page
   • Confirmation page has a script (shown below) which contains the {{lead.Email Address}} token
   • {{lead.Email Address}} token is populated by the time of page load
4. Script redirects people to the On24 recorded webinar, using the email address token to link their viewing session to an actual user's email address
5. Marketo smart campaign contains flow step to change record to a status of "Registered"
   • Users with a status of "Registered" are sent to On24 via Launchpoint integration
6. On24 sends viewer's engagement data to Salesforce campaign member via scribe integration

However, what seems to be happening is that, for the second bullet of step #3, the user's email address is not reliably populating (in all the cases I can recall, this is only happening for users that do not already exist in the database, and need to be created prior to having their tokens populated on the Confirmation page).

• There has been a separate issue where I've been testing using a "+" sign in my email address, which apparently is not correctly encoded in the redirect URL. So, "testemail+1@gmail.com" ends up looking like "testemail 1@gmail.com"

When this happens, a blank record (no email address, etc) is created in On24, and step 5 from the above sends another record to On24. The blank record collects the engagement data because it's linked to the user's on-demand session, and the proper record (i.e. the one with an email address) has no engagement associated with it. 

On24 recommends this setup to their clients, and apparently many use it successfully. We have tried to troubleshoot why this might be happening with our instance in particular, and here's what we've tried:

• Using a nearly completely blank confirmation page (since we're redirecting anyway), in case image load times were somehow prioritized over token load times
• Using the exact same script in an On24 test instance, which we did not test as thoroughly but did seem to work 

Potential solutions if this cannot work out:

1. Stop sending people directly into the on-demand experience, and instead send them an email which they can click into
2. Set up a second redirect, so that the confirmation page's script has another opportunity to populate with the token

Has this issue (Marketo tokens not rendering reliably on confirmation pages) occurred with anyone else? It would make sense to me that it's tricky to have Marketo "race" to create the record in time for the lead's token to be populated in time for the page load, but given how widely used this method is among On24 customers, it would suggest something is unique with our instance (though we do not have an unusual amount of scripts running (just standard analytics / ad trackers), and we do no intermediary processing of form submissions.

Any help would be appreciated!

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For reference:

• Marketo Registration Page
• Marketo Confirmation Page (contains redirect script, so you will be immediately routed to On24)
• On24 Redirect Script:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://event.on24.com/interface/registration/autoreg/index.
html?eventid={{my.On24 Event ID}}&key={{my.On24 Event Key}}&deletecookie=true&email={{lead.Email Address}}" />

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Has this issue (Marketo tokens not rendering reliably on confirmation pages) occurred with anyone else? It would make sense to me that it's tricky to have Marketo "race" to create the record in time for the lead's token to be populated in time for the page load, but given how widely used this method is among On24 customers, it would suggest something is unique with our instance...

It has never been (and presumably will never be) possible to rely on tokens being populated (i.e. tracking cookies being associated) on the very next pageview after a form submission. Not in any Marketo instance. It may only take < 100ms, but there's no coordination with browser navigation.

So anybody at ON24 who says this works hasn't tested it.

On the other hand, there's no reason to use the {{lead.token}} when you literally have the email address field on the form! Why wouldn't you just append it to the confirmation URL, as it is readily available in the form's onSuccess event?

Also, as for the encoding, that's yet another reason to include the variable via JS on the form page, where you can call encodeURIComponent.

[Owen_Millard1]

Thanks a lot for the response - not sure how I missed it!

On the other hand, there's no reason to use the {{lead.token}} when you literally have the email address field on the form! Why wouldn't you just append it to the confirmation URL, as it is readily available in the form's onSuccess event?

That all sounds very logical, and I feel a little foolish that it didn't occur to me that we could more directly leverage the information (i.e. the email address) that's been provided in the step immediately beforehand.

That said, without much of a technical background, script/code-wise, solutions that require that skillset are often not the first to come to mind. The documentation to implement this seems relatively straightforward, though out of my wheelhouse, so I'll circle up with my team internally.

Thank you, I appreciate the recommendation!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Same code from Redirect to Thank You page and append query variables to the URL only put

vals.Email‍‍

in place of

document.location.href‍

Note case-sensitivity.