Sign Up List Data and Referrer Link Stamp

[Devin_McDonnell]

Hey all,

So we are relatively new to Marketo and being a media company running digital publications, we use it a bit differently that most people. In order to ask the questions properly, you'll need some insight on how we set up our forms:

Being that we publish a ton of content and the form requirements change often, we decided to use a unique form for each individual marketing program we run. Tied to the individual program form is a unique smart list that we use as our "Sign Up List" which pulls anyone who has filled out the program form. There are two fields on our sign up lists that we can't seem to get to work properly. We are looking for the following:

1. Date of Download (Date of Form Submission)
2. Referrer Link

I know that Marketo tracks Date Modified and Original Referrer but there are two problems here:

1. Date Modified changes if they trigger any other data value change after filling out the form in the program
2. Original Referrer link (as far as I can tell) only shows the link used when they first came into Marketo as a new contact. And even if that's not the case, would change if they filled out a different form.

I'm basically looking for a snapshot here, as "stamp" if you will. A static listing that they filled out this unique form on this date and they came from this link...and these values should never change (unless they fill out the form again for whatever reason). Am I missing something here? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[Jim_Thao7]

I don't believe that you can do a data value change of a field to the referrer link unless you do a lot of custom MA designing to actually get that value into an indexed custom field in Marketo.  However, if you want to get the Date of Download, you can use the system datetime token {{system.dateTime}} to record that into a field when someone triggers a campaign.

[SanfordWhiteman]

1. Original Referrer link (as far as I can tell) only shows the link used when they first came into Marketo as a new contact. And even if that's not the case, would change if they filled out a different form.

Yes, Original Referrer will not be of use. For my info see my comments just today on Original Referrer: What's it really for?

As you're noting, Marketo does not consider a set of form data (and metadata) to be a new "dimension" of a lead. Rather, forms are transport mechanisms for writing to flat lead fields, which (unless you have blocked field updates) will be overwritten by subsequent submissions.

While sorting leads into static lists or programs can preserve information about who filled out a given form over time, you can't store metadata like the date of download or the referrer that way.

You can create an Interesting Moment, which is a persistent sort-of dimension on the lead (much more so than a custom field or the Filled Out Form event itself) that contains a snapshot of the date + referrer.

What many of us do to expand form functionality is create history fields that keep an ever-appending log of form data and/or metadata. While that history field is technically flat -- as it's stored on the lead as a string -- by continuously adding data to it you create an implicit dimension or, as I like to call it, a poor man's custom object (though actually more powerful than real custom objects in many ways). I use JSON structure for such fields, since the format is self-describing and supports nested internal dimensions as well.