Report on CNAMEs visit

[Amit_Jain]

We have several CNAMEs (40+) setup in Marketo for landing pages and I have to check which of these are active and being used. Is there any report that can show me how many visits are there for any of these CNAMEs within last 1 year or so?

Regards,
Amit

[SanfordWhiteman]

Visit Web Page activities age out after 90 days, so the last 1 year would be out of reach from the UI no matter what.

And anonymous web activities aren't queryable via API, so even if you were archiving logs every month, you wouldn't have that data.

So what you're left with, as of today, is creating a bunch of filtered Web Page Activity reports, one for each Domain Alias x 2 for Anonymous and Known, to get the last 90 days.

If you plan for this kind of reporting in the future, you can run the reports every 30d and store the CSV offline.  Or, quite frankly, use another analytics package for this, like Clicky, GA, etc. as they will be better suited to keep anonymous activities as first-class citizens.

P.S. The CNAME -- canonical name -- part of a CNAME RR is actually the right-hand side, not the left-hand side. The CNAME for all of your Landing Page Domain Aliases and your Primary LP Domain are the same: {accountstring}.mktoweb.com. What you mean is that you want to check which Domain Aliases are active.  I know it's confusing, and the Marketo UI doesn't help, but when people say "CNAME" they usually mean to say the exact opposite.

[Amit_Jain]

Thank you Sandy! It makes sense.

Just to give you some more background, the sole purpose of this exercise for now is to get rid of any inactive domain alias that we have setup in Marketo. As you know, once you have SSL enabled, you have to purchase additional domain package to add more domains with SSL. We already have 60+ domains and I just wanted to get rid of the legacy domains but at the same time wanted to make sure that these are not in use anymore.

I'll try to create the filtered web activity report as you suggested and see if this will help.

For future, we are in the process of standardizing our analytics stack and as you suggested, we will be implementing GA across Marketo LPs.

Thanks again!

Regards,
Amit

[SanfordWhiteman]

I feel your pain on this. The main problem is not the workload of creating the reports (which is mostly grunt work) but that you can't reach back > 90d.

But you could change the legacy domains' DNS records so they go to another (non-Marketo) server instead, then get redirected to one of your more recent domains. While not ideal, it would tell you if anybody is landing on them.

[Amit_Jain]

Thanks Sandy!

That's the plan. I'll be asking our IT team to setup the re-direct to our main domain.

Regards,
Amit