Undesired behavior when using Personalized URLs PURLs

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Christina Fuentealba, back when we talked prior to this past year's Marketo Summit (April 2017), you mentioned that your team was going to enhance this process (achieving the expected outcome in scenario #3 above) by restricting the personalization to just a few attributes (name, company, country, etc.).  The planned deployment date would be shortly after Summit (in the Spring).  Can you provide us with an update on this?

[SanfordWhiteman]

You saw my pURL fix, right, Dan?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Yes, Sandy (assuming you're referring to this: http://blog.teknkl.com/fixing-marketo-purls.  Unfortunately, for us to use your FormsPlus base library, we would have to go through a comprehensive privacy/security review with our IT/InfoSec teams.  So the desire is to have this natively work as expected within Marketo.  And supposedly Marketo was going to fix this back in the spring/summer - based on my conversations with Christina just before (and during) Summit. 

BTW, I revised the scenarios up top, in my original post.  This issue - like you've clarified many times - is when the users has an associated cookie (e.g., anonymously visiting a Munchkin-enabled page) AND THEN tries to access a PURL-enabled URL for them, the personalized tokens render blank (even though there is a lead record in Marketo with this data).

[Dan_Stevens_]

Let's say we include a PURL in an email and the user has never been cookied (but is a lead in Marketo).  Can anyone confirm if the LP - regardless if the lead has been cookied before - would display the personalized content as desired.  My thought here is - for those leads that have never been cookied, will be, when they click the tracking link in the email.

Also, Sandy, can you identify the inaccuracies that you noted in my original post?  I'd be happy to modify this so that it reflects accurate behavior.

Sanford Whiteman​

[SanfordWhiteman]

I'd like to avoid the expression "user has [never] been cookied" because it isn't clear whether that means "known lead has been assoicated" or something else.

Using the the expression "browser has never had a Munchkin cookie" will probably be clearer.

If the browser has no Munchkin cookie at the time the pURL is rendered, the page will render in the context of the Marketo Lead, including tokens, snippets, etc. Note such a cookie wouldn't have to have been set by a Marketo-hosted LP, let alone by the pURL LP itself.  It could've been set by your 3rd-party website.  In any case if there is no cookie, the pURL operates as desired.

However, if there is a cookie, even an anonymous cookie -- and if Munchkin is enabled on the pURL LP, there will be a cookie immediately ​after​ the first view -- then the pURL will not operate as needed/desired. As I phrased it on another thread, the pURL pathname extension (Marketo Unique Code) is a "weak associator": in the absence of any other associated/unassociated session info, it'll help you out, but once any other info is available, it shows its weakness.

So the solution to the pURL problem -- and it can be done even now -- involves "archiving" the existing cookie before sending people to the pURL page, then restoring it later.