Tracking on website and customer portal

[anissabrach]

Hi, there are some old threads about cross domain tracking but wondering if something has changed or people have other ideas for my problem.

We have our munchkin code on our website which works fine (domain 1: www.xyzchargingcard.com). We also have customer portal (domain 2: mycards.xyzchargingcards.com). We'd like to do some web personalisation on our website AND in our customer portal.

i.e. if I see in Marketo that x person hasn't got Product a, show banner for Product a on the website and in the customer portal. We'd use a web personalisation tool for that that is connected to Marketo/SFDC.

Now, I was just thinking we'd add the munchkin code on the customer portal too but presumable they'd just look like anonymous users? Customers do need to log into the portal but that's not a marketo form. Maybe there could be a way to recognize them through that?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Did you purposely leave off the “s” at the end of the website (www) domain?

Otherwise, if they share a common parent domain example.com, they are already sharing the same Munchkin session cookie. So if someone is associated on one site, they’re associated on the other, too — not anonymous.

[anissabrach]

That was just an example. The domains are different. I initially thought it was a subdomain, but it's not.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

If the domains don’t share a common private domain suffix (e.g. www.example.com  and pages.example.com share example.com) then they can’t automatically share a cookie.

You can, however, pass the session token from one site to another if you control the navigation between the sites. That is, if you control all the links from Site A to Site B, then decorate the links on Site A with the cookie from Site B, and have Site B reuse the token value if it sees one in the URL.

There are also ways to do this even if you don’t control all the navigation, by redirecting people from Site B to Site A to get Site A’s cookie, which Site A passes back in a second redirect. You can see this very method in use on many major apps, even it sounds clunky. But you’ll need a skilled developer to implement it.