Persons created with email UTMs

[cookiemonstersa]

I feel like there must be an easy explanation or solution but I failed to find it online. 

When we send emails, we include UTMs in the emails. We then get people filling out forms who are brand new people to Marketo, with these email UTMs attached to them. Maybe people are forwarding our email, or sharing a link with the utm attached. 

However, let's say they fill out form ABC on program XYZ. Program XYZ is saying only the capture acquisition if the query string is empty because we have other paid programs looking for downloads of the same content piece with paid UTMs. 

This leads to the said person having no acquisition program. I am wondering if it makes most sense to change it from "query string is empty" to "query string not contains (any paid parameters).

Hope the explanation makes sense, thank you!! 

Background: URL hidden fill is (URL Parameter) 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Such issues due to email forwards/link sharing by people are not new! As far as the acquisition program is concerned, simply put, in my opinion, any new people with or without UTM parameters should have their acquisition program as the program that brought them into the system. You can use other fields to store the medium, source, etc. for the people based on the UTM parameters, e.g., in case a person comes via a Google Ad, you'd want to keep the acquisition program with the program name that had the form/LP in it and update the source to Google and Medium to say Paid Search.

[cookiemonstersa]

Gottcha, thanks! 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Fundamentally, “query string is empty” is incorrect because there’s no reason to assume a search engine will not append random query params.

The expectation on the modern web (though it’s not technically standard and it’s sometimes violated) is that additional, unrecognized query params are ignored. So if you mandate no query string at all, you’re breaking that expectation.

[cookiemonstersa]

Understood, thanks!