Relationship between a Marketo landing page template and a landing page using that template

[Danny_Tran5]

Hi Dave Roberts,

I'm not trying to hijack Makiko's post, but I've noticed some strange behavior with the landing page templates and how edits made to them don't reflect within re-approved pages within the Marketing Activities section.

For instance, if I change the year of this area from 2018 to 2019

                <div class="col-md-6 pull-left" >
                    <div id="link-footer" class="mktoText" mktoName="Footer copyright">
                        <p style="font-size: 14px;" class="copyright"><a href="https://www.chargepoint.com/legal/">Legal</a> | <a href="https://www.chargepoint.com/privacy/">Privacy Policy</a></p>
                      <p style="font-size: 14px;" >Copyright © 2019 ChargePoint, Inc. All rights reserved.</p>
                    </div>
                </div>

and then re-approve landing pages utilizing this template. The year will still show as 2018.

However if I make this minor adjustment to the id of the parent div tag

                <div class="col-md-6 pull-left" >
                    <div id="link-footerv2" class="mktoText" mktoName="Footer copyright">
                        <p style="font-size: 14px;" class="copyright"><a href="https://www.chargepoint.com/legal/">Legal</a> | <a href="https://www.chargepoint.com/privacy/">Privacy Policy</a></p>
                      <p style="font-size: 14px;" >Copyright © 2019 ChargePoint, Inc. All rights reserved.</p>
                    </div>
                </div>

add a seeming pointless "v2" to the "link-footer" id. It will update the year value in the re-approved pages.

I've checked the style sheets and there's nothing that should dictate the actual content of the pages.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Dave_Roberts]

Hey Danny-

Changing the ID value of the editable area is another way to 'force' the template update an editable area. Im not exactly sure why this happens, but it suggests that Marketo is using the ID value of the modules to distinguish between a new editable area and an existing one. I haven't run into issue changing the ID value to make an update, so as far as I know this is another way to go about pushing a change to an editable area.

The "Marketo thing" that's going on here is that once a Landing Page is approved, the content inside the editable areas is "remembered" - even when the template changes. This is actually a really good thing b/c otherwise each time you updated the template, it'd pull all the 'default/placeholder' content from your template into your editable areas and you'd have to start over on all your assets (what a nightmare!).

To work around this, sometimes we'll leave the footer area as "non-editable" and that helps to ensure that an update made to the template (footer) is pushed to all the pages as soon as they're reapproved. A better way to go about this (in my opinion) is to use a snippet for the header and footer instead of an editable area. You could accomplish this by changing the class="mktoText" to class="mktoSnippet" on your element w/ id="link-footerv2" (or maybe the entire footer since this looks like one column -- I'll usually make the entire section (footer) a snippet. You can then grab all the html that's inside your editable area (or footer) and dump that into a Snippet. The downside of this approach is that a snippet will look the same on every page it's used on, so you if you need a different footer, you'd need to clone the snippet and make changes to the new snippet. Otherwise, snippets are a one-to-many element that will allow you to make an update in one place (the snippet) and once you've reapproved the snippet, it'll push instantly (without add'l approvals to the LPs) into all the LPs that are using it. It's really great for updating copyright years.

Another way that I've seen this handled is to use tokens and set them on a high-level folder inside of Marketing Activities so it'll cascade down thru all your programs/assets. Then, you can get rid of the editable area all together and use a token instead.

[Danny_Tran5]

Dave this is very insightful. I really appreciate the info and suggestions here. Now that you've confirmed that editable areas don't update without the workaround, I'll stop procrastinating on using a smarter solution like snippets/tokens.

Thanks!

[Makiko_Hultz1]

Danny, thank you for posting the additional question!

Dave,

I did ask the question at last year's Marketo summit and I found out that the issue was exactly what you pointed out above, I made the updates inside an editable area on the template. I ended up updating the landing page one by one. We are updating our landing page template this year and I'll make sure to incorporate what you suggested above. Thank you for your feedback!