Trigger based on Fills out Form: central form + Constraint: Webpage doesn't always fire

[Gerard_van_den_]

To keep form maintenance under control, we thought it was wise to create a central form for (e.g.) webinar registrations that lives in the Design Studio. In the webinar program we've created a local Landing Page with the central form on it. We then listen to this central form being filled out (Trigger: Fills out Form), with Form name = 'central form' and Constraint: Web page = 'local Marketo LP'. People who will out the form will be marked as Registered as a result.

I now see that half of the members is Member of the program, but not Registered. So it seems the Trigger as described above doesn't work in all cases. I vaguely recall having met this problem before, and adding a second trigger Fills out Form, with Constraint: Referrer = 'local Marketo LP' may solve the problem (I'm monitoring it as we speak).

However, I just don't understand whether my setup is simply incorrect or what else may be causing this.

Any insights much appreciated!

Gerard

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Gerard,

This is weird. Please look at the activity log of one of these missing leads and focus there on the fills out form event. display the acitvity details and provide here a screenshot.

-Greg

[Gerard_van_den_]

see also my observation below, it seems to be related to a merge activity.  The Activities simply stop with the top most entry: Change Program Status, whereas for leads that are not merged (bottom screenshot), you see a couple more activity entries, including, most importantly: Fill Out Form.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Gerard,

The merge activity occurs because the lead that fills out the form was already in your database, together with an anonymous leads that had a cookie on the visitor's browser. So, when this anonymous lead filled out the form and Marketo recognized the email address, the anonymous and previously known leads were immediately merged.

The fills out form event has been fired, as you can see at the top of the activity log.

Check the qualification rules of the smart campaign, to see whether it is not set to "run only once" or "run only once every XX" and also check if this lead has not already filled out that form in the past.

-Greg

[Gerard_van_den_]

Hi Greg,

Schedule is set so 'every time', and this registration form is really brand, new, these are people that have not filled out this form before.

What I'm confused about is that apparently (top screenshot) the Program is updated by the fact that the Form has been filled out (Change Program State), but there is NO activity called 'Filled out Form' in the activity log - whereas that IS visible in the lower screenshot, next to the Change Program State.

As I'm basing my trigger for Registration on the 'Filled Out Form' Activity, and not on the 'Change Program State', the trigger is not working in the case a merge has taken place just before.

Update: It has other side effects too, like Lead Scoring, which in our case is also based on Filled Out Form activity. That part is also not working for merged leads.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Gerard,

What are the details of the filled out form activity of the merged lead? Is it the right form again?

Could it be that your instance has a strong backlog of smart campaigns running that the the FoF one will run quite later? Have looked at the campaign queue?

Sorry to ask questions that seem obvious, but there is obviously something, for instance a filter or a qualification rule that prevents the lead to enter the smart campaign, and it has to be checked one by one

Otherwise, you will have to file a support ticket.

-Greg

[Gerard_van_den_]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for keeping asking questions. None of them seems to give a solution yet though.

And again, there is no Filled Out Form activity in the log in the first place, that's mostly what I'm confused about. How can it be the system doesn't log that...

As a last resort, I just tried a completely newly set up form on my landing page (instead of a cloned one), that didn't help either.

I'll do as you suggested and see whether support can help me on this one.

Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi again Gerard,

this is all the more strange as I have never seen merging 2 leads removing some activities...

Keep us posted of what the support says.

-Greg

[Gerard_van_den_]

To keep you posted: after a couple of rounds at regular support, they have finally escalated it to development. Support couldn't explain why the activity log was incomplete. Awaiting further information. I've shared my concerns as form fills are at the very core of Marketo's functionality.

[Gerard_van_den_ · Accepted solution]

So, after some perseverance, I got the answer to this disturbing behavior: it was a bug that resulted from the move to project Orion. Patch should have been applied on 20 Dec 2016.

[quote]

The issue you were seeing was caused by a flaw in the Munchkin v2 element. This flaw caused by an incorrect directory naming convention in the web file info table, when migrating anonymous leads during the merge lead activity. This caused the form fill out activity to fail to be added to the lead's activity log.

Our developers had learned this after customers such as yourselves had reported the issue. They had created a patch and it was pushed out to all customers yesterday. So although you will not see the past Form Fill Out activities during the period of the outage, you should start seeing them now. Again this is only for leads that have merged and anonymous lead with a known lead.

[quote ends]