Multiple Duplicate Records Affecting Form Fill Attribution

[Guitarrista82]

Hi Community,

We have an issue where we have built a form in one of our many partitions. This form is embedded on an external website. The way it works is someone fills out the form and if their email address exists in this specific partition, they get opted into SMS marketing messages via a smart campaign we have built.

The problem we are seeing is that if someone fills out the form and uses an email that already exists in Marketo but in a different partition, the form fillout gets attributed to that existing record in the other partition and they do not get opted into SMS messages because they do not exist in the dedicated partition where the campaign is run.

What we would like to have happen is that if the person who fills out the form does not have an account in the dedicated partition, we would like one to be created. However, we currently have the Email field blocked from getting updated via form fillout because we don't want our data to get messy and unmanageable.

Does anyone know of a potential workaround for this particular issue?

Thank you,
LK

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You’d have to have Marketo create a custom lookup key for form fills (a.k.a. “compound primary key” although that’s a bit of a misnomer). The lookup key would be Email Address + Partition ID instead of just Email Address.

But you must plan a change like this very carefully.

[Guitarrista82]

Thanks Sanford!

Can you please explain how this would work from a technical setup perspective? Would it require an update to the form or backend reconfiguration?

Also, what would the form fillout process look like? I.e. would both the member's email and partition have to match the compound primary key to qualify for the smart campaign? What happens if the member has multiple accounts in Marketo or if the member does not even exist in Marketo yet?

I created a simple diagram below:

Thanks again,

LK

[Jo_Pitts1]

@Guitarrista82 ,

it's a back end configuration change by Marketo.  You'll need to reach out to support and ask them to set this up for you.

To @SanfordWhiteman's earlier point.  Be careful about checking that deduping across partitions for form fills is what you ALWAYS want, as that's what you'll get.

FWIW - you'll get intentional duplicates with this approach, but based on your diagram that seems to be what you're after.

Cheers

Jo 

[Darshil_Shah1]

@Guitarrista82, By default, Marketo doesn't allow creating duplicate records across partitions; however, you can get your database's default de-duplication field or criteria updated to Email Address + Person Partition Id by reaching out to the Marketo support team, as Sandy recommends, and you should be good! If a personA fills in a form in the workspaceA, it will appear in the partitionA, and the same with the workspaceB and partitionB, and the same with updates. Whatever form they fill out (by workspace), it will update the correct partition.

Here's an important note: Everything will be in order until cookies come into play, as they take precedence over all established behaviors (including the overridden de-duplication crtieria). If a browser contains a cookie associated with a specific person, that person's Marketo record will be updated, irrespective of whether the form submitted is in workspace A or workspace B (or any workspace as a matter of fact)!

Here's an article you'd find useful: https://nation.marketo.com/t5/marketo-whisperer-blogs/duplicate-person-records-with-forms-when-using...

I hope this is helpful. Please let us know if you have questions.