Tracking Web Activity

[jwang]

Has anybody else built their websites in house and developed methods for tracking web activity through Marketo?

We cannot track lead IDs for 80% of our site visitors because we have built our own website form instead of Marketo Forms. The other 20% have their activities tracked because they come through clicking our email link.

We tried the REST Associate Lead call but it requires a known lead ID. 

How can we sync these anonymous IDs to the Munchkin cookies?

Any other solutions for activity tracking would also be appreciated.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You’ll potentially destroy your API calls if you make individual association calls in response to high-volume end user activities. The REST API isn’t built for that kind of transactional volume and shouldn’t be used that way. At the very least, you must enforce your own rate limits before opening connections to Marketo.

The safest practice, regardless of projected volume, is to submit a hidden Marketo form from the browser that contains only the Email Address, in addition to posting the custom form to your CMS. Marketo forms have, in practice, no rate limit.

Note if the person doesn’t exist in Marketo yet and your CMS writes to a Marketo-synced CRM, that’ll create an immediate duplicate when the person syncs over from the CRM. You can write webhook-based processes to automatically merge the Marketo-only person with its companion that came over from the CRM. (Unlike other dedupe logic, the rules for this are relatively easy to express because the Marketo-only person has only an Email Address and one easily identifiable action.)

Another option is to store the Marketo Munchkin cookie(s) in a custom string field that’s synced between the CRM and Marketo. Then in Marketo, pick up that value and call the Associate Lead endpoint via a webhook.

[Darshil_Shah1]

I agree with Sandy! You should be using the Marketo form submission in the background here if you want to continue using your non-Marketo forms or replace them with Marketo forms. This is indeed the right way to go instead of trying to figure out the way to associate Munchkin token with the people you have in your database as known/anonymous records which as Sandy said, even if you’re able to ID people by their lead id (assuming you set up a way to get their lead id once they sign in/provide email address), isn’t still a very scalable solution given that the sheer number of API calls it could consume. Evidently, this could easily become a bottleneck (this could also affect your existing integrations making API calls to Marketo). FYI, due to similar reasons, Marketo’s formSubmit API to post the form data isn’t a very good alternative to the Marketo form submission in background method for posting non-Marketo form data to Marketo. Again, as a first option, IMHO, if possible, you should at least consider replacing existing non-Marketo forms with Marketo forms.