Munchkin Tracking Across Sub-Domains

[Angus_McCann1]

We have a main website, www.ABC.com. and various sub-domains - careers.ABC.com, store.ABC.com, data.ABC.com, etc.

We have the tracking script on each individual subdomain, but we were told that there are limitations to the script.

Namely, let's say I'm known to Marketo, and I get an email directing me to www.ABC.com. I click-through and get cookied in Marketo and now all of my activity on www.ABC.com  is tracked. I click on a link on ABC.com that takes me to store.ABC.com. Marketo loses "sight" of me in that instance, and is not tracking on my activity record what I am doing on store.ABC.com. It's not until I am directed to store.ABC.com through a Marketo form or email that Marketo will marry my activity on store.ABC.com to the rest of my lead activity.

My question is: is there a way that once you are "cookied" by Marketo, it follows you through ALL subdomains, rather than having to make sure people are redirected through a Marketo asset first? Even if it requires additional coding from our dev team or even Marketo professional services... I believe when we were setting up our instance I read somewhere that this was possible, but I cannot seem to find it again. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Please supply your actual domain. (Also, abc.com isn't a suitable placeholder -- use example.com as it is officially reserved for examples.)

2-letter TLDs need special treatment. Otherwise the cookie is automatically created at the 2LD (second-level domain) example.com.

[Casey_Grimes]

On a basic level, Marketo writes cookies to the domain .example.com, meaning that the cookie should be readable from any given subdomain. Now, there are complications with two-letter TLDs, and if you have a non-standard deployment of how your cookies are recorded, that can cause issues.

But, by default, everything should work according to your example without issue. Now, there may not be Munchkin.js initialized on store.example.com compared to example.com, and that could explain the lack of visibility in the activity log. But it's not because Munchkin.js can't read the cookie.

[Angus_McCann1]

So when we went to launch our instance of Marketo a year ago and were putting the script on different pages, our people internally told us that www.example.com was a subdomain of example.com and therefore, putting on our homepage was essentially equivalent to putting it on a 2LD. Is this not the case? 

I'm embarrassed to admit that we were rushing to launch everything else that we just put the script on every subdomain we could and accepted the short comings at the time without truly understanding how the script works. So if there is a Marketo doc even you could refer me to for further reading that would be great. (Everything I've found so far is only with respect to where to find the script in your instance.)

[SanfordWhiteman]

So when we went to launch our instance of Marketo a year ago and were putting the script on different pages, our people internally told us that www.example.com was a subdomain of example.com and therefore, putting on our homepage was essentially equivalent to putting it on a 2LD. Is this not the case?

It is the case unless your TLD is a 2-letter TLD. See https://blog.teknkl.com/munchkin-2-letter-tlds-broken/ 

If you have a 2-letter TLD, you must set the config appropriately, everywhere you load Munchkin.

[SanfordWhiteman]

... or use my domain suffix finder script from that blog post, and you never need to hard-code the right domain level.

[Angus_McCann1]

Our domain is chronicle.com

[SanfordWhiteman]

Then you don't have to do anything special. Just make sure Munchkin is loaded on all of your pages.