Registering Multiple Leads for Same Event

[Nick_Nappo]

The manager of one of our branches is doing an event, and has registered a lead on the event's landing page.  That lead shows up on the registration list.  Then he tries to register multiple leads from the same company as the first.  Well, all these subsequent leads he tries to register do not show in the list.  Meanwhile, he's closed out the browser before registering each subsequent lead, but to no avail.

What seems to be the problem here?  Is it the browser's cache?  Do I need to turn some setting?  It's frustrating because apparently multiple reps at this branch have registered their clients for the event, so there are about 50 leads that should be on the registration list but are not.

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Nick,

Is the page being cookied? If so, what's likely happening here is that each new submission is overwriting the original submission made by the manager (the cookie basically thinks it's one person entering the form and that the new data is a correction to the existing linked record).

If you know that internal staff will be submitting a form with customer data, it's best to remove tracking. Note that there's other side effects to your staff submitting customer data on a cookied form - including that their activity will be mapped to that contact record (so if that manager is visiting your website, those visits will now appear on that contact record's activity log, even though it isn't actually them).

Pro-Tip: Disable Cookies on a Landing Page

[SanfordWhiteman]

Is the page being cookied? If so, what's likely happening here is that each new submission is overwriting the original submission made by the manager (the cookie basically thinks it's one person entering the form and that the new data is a correction to the existing linked record).

That's not how (Marketo) forms work, though. The record is not updated: quite the contrary, a new lead is created.

Also, to properly create a Referral Form (as that's what this is) you can't just remove tracking on the one LP. You have to remove (or, more properly, suspend) any existing cookies whenever that page loads, because otherwise the cookie just gets attached to the form as usual. Loading Munchkin is not a requirement to have a cookie present on the page. The code you linked to takes advantage of undocumented forms behavior to suspend the cookie from the form submission without deleting it entirely.

Anyway, the reason you need to implement the Referral Form pattern properly isn't because the original submission is overwritten.  It's because of the second area you mention, the unwanted mapping of Munchkin session activity to newly created records.

[Grace_Brebner3]

Oop. Thanks for the correction Sanford, clearly my original understanding of this was misinformed.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You're not alone. We often wish it worked the way you describe, because that would make it a lot easier for leads to change their own email addresses instead of the fancy form + flow way we have to do it.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Nick, please provide the URL of your LP w/the form.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Also, while we await the URL, couple other points:

Meanwhile, he's closed out the browser before registering each subsequent lead, but to no avail.

Closing the browser has no effect on Marketo's Munchkin cookie.  The cookie times out after a period (2 years by default) of inactivity, but lasts across browser sessions (it wouldn't be of much use if did not persist across sessions).

Then he tries to register multiple leads from the same company as the first.

The Company field isn't participating in the deduping process unless you've specially configured this in your instance -- and even if it were part of the dedupe key, it would make submissions more unique, not less.

Is it the browser's cache?

The browser cache is not involved, unless you consider cookies to be broadly part of the "cache."

[Veronica_Holme4]

Quick question... is he by any chance using the same email address for each person he's registering?

[SanfordWhiteman]

That would be kind of strange, but I wondered too! Like only varying the full name and using the rep's own email address or something.  But why you would expect that to be the right way to sign people up to a MA platform is beyond me...

[Dan_Stevens_]

Nothing surprises me anymore. We recently had an account exec enter hundreds of his contacts in CRM. He didn’t know their email addresses - so he just entered his work email address for every contact!  Clearly, we need stricter governance in CRM!