Possible to cookie leads without sending a Marketo email?

[Alexis_D_Alba1]

Hey community!

Some of our communication is not sent via Marketo. However, we would still like to cookie these leads so that we can track website activity in Marketo prior to a form fill.  Does anyone have insights on how/if it's possible to cookie a lead by Marketo without sending an email through marketo?

Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Alexis,

The cookie will be placed in your lead's browser when and only when he navigates on a web site on which you have placed a munchkin JS. Any cookie you would set on another domain would not be readable on your domain anyway.

But then, if the lead comes from another source, he will get a cookie as soon as he arrives on your web page or landing page and anonymous activity will be recorded. That anonymous activity will be appended to the lead when the lead fills out a form.

Is there anything else you need that I do not describe here?

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hey Alexis,

Did you ask this previously? I think there's a thread with the exact same title from not long ago. Anyway, the answer is yes, but you must include identifying information in your links, since Marketo's native tracking will not be available. The easiest way is to include the email address in the query string. But if you have purposeful duplicates, you'll instead have to pass the Lead.Id in the link and use a webhook to reconcile. The former is easier and more scalable.

[Anonymous]

They will be cookied if they visit a web page, no email is necessary

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Guess the discrepancy between your (and Greg's) response and mine is in our interpretation of "cookie."

I'm pretty sure (having worked with her on other issues) Alexis means associated cookie.  Without mkt_tok-enized links, there will be no built-in association, but if you include the email address and/or lead ID in a non-Marketo email you can silently associate the resulting web activities with the original, known Marketo lead instead of forcing them to fill out a form (extremely useful when you export Marketo leads for a partner to do a one-time send).

If the concept is just to have an anonymous lead / unassociated cookie then yes, that already happens just by running Munchkin on the site.

[Alexis_D_Alba1]

Thanks all! Sanford Whiteman​ you're exactly right. We're looking to make that association with a non marketo email. Can you provide an example of how we would set up the structure so that marketo picks up the email address in the url?  Thanks again!

[Anonymous]

If you send an email through another ESP like Mailchimp or CC and append the person's email in a query parameter to the link you will be able to make a munchkin API "Associate Lead" call when the person first visits the page to make sure the person's email is associated with the cookie Marketo gives them.

Send them to a link with their email in a query parameter: 

yoursite.com/landing-page/?email=person@gmail.com

On your site, if the query parameter exists, make sure something like this is on the page (not paste-able). The docs here​.

Munchkin.munchkinFunction('associateLead', { "Email": "person@gmail.com"}, '{{YOUR KEY}}');

That will associate the email with the existing Marketo cookie I believe.

I think this is what you are looking for Alexis D'Alba.  Sanford Whiteman​ sound right?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, no, because you must never, ever compute Munchkin APl keys in the browser!

I'll answer by way of a blog post this weekend.

[Anonymous]

Yes yes. There would have to be some back-end code to check the query parameter and output the hash. Sorry I didn't specify.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, that's a slight improvement, but still essentially creates a service which will create a Munchkin API key for any email you provide.  I don't think the key should ever should be served unless the user is authenticated (i.e. a password-protected area).  Of course, whether there's a special vulnerability also depends on whether and where you're blocking field updates, as I'll get into in my blog post.