Using Marketo Landing Pages for Event Certificates

[Natalie_Kremer]

We're researching ways to automate our event participation certificates and it seems to me that a Marketo Landing Page could work, but I'm wondering if others have used this in the past with success. We're tracking our event registration and participation through a Marketo Program currently, but when someone attends, we're sending an alert to someone to manually generate and send the participation certificate.

Has anyone used a Marketo Landing Page to serve up a participation certificate? We would need it to include the person's name, event name and date, but all of these already live on the Program level as Tokens. My thought is we could send them the landing page link in a thank you for attending email and when they click they would be able to view the personalized certificate on a landing page via Tokens. 

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Yes! We've absolutely done this, and also used the LP certificate to generate a dynamic PDF so it's a permanent, printable copy.

[fzsofi]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman ,
I'm trying to make this work the way you described in your article (Use Marketo LPs as PDF templates with PDFmyURL — TEKNKL :: Blog), however it's not working as expected. Technically the download of a pdf happens after clicking on the link provided in the email, however what gets downloaded is not the Certificate LP, but our fallback page. 
Our certif LP is: https://web.companyname.com/Certificate.html
Link in email:  https://web.companyname.com/Certificate.html#pdf
Our fallback domain: https://companyname.com
The downloaded pdf shows https://companyname.com page.
Could you suggest why is this happening and how to fix it?

[Natalie_Kremer]

Sanford Whiteman​ I've got this set-up on the landing page, but when I use the PDF generator my First Name and Last Name Tokens don't carry down to the PDF of the certificate. Did you run into this at all? I've enabled PURLS, too, just in case, but that didn't make a difference.

Here's a sample LP: http://info.mheducation.com/Sample-Assets---NK_Certificate-Test.html

[SanfordWhiteman]

Anything that appears in the LP should be in the PDF: the PDF maker has no idea that something was inserted as a token originally in the Marketo source code.

Is it possible that you're failing to pass the mkt_tok (which identifies the lead) to pdfMyURL? What's an example of a full link you're sending (copied from your browser's location bar)?

pURLs are broken without an assist from JS, but they wouldn't be the cause here anyway.

[Natalie_Kremer]

This is the URL we’re passing to pdfmyurl: http://pdfmyurl.com?url=http://info.mheducation.com/Sample-Assets-NK_Certificate-Test.html<http://pdfmyurl.com?url=http:/info.mheducation.com/Sample-Assets-NK_Certificate-Test.html>. How would you recommend we append the Lead Token to the URL?

[Delinda_Tinkey1]

Hi @Natalie_Kremer ,

Did you get this to work? I'm having the same issue with the first and last name tokens.

[Natalie_Kremer]

@Delinda_Tinkey1, I was not able to get this solution to work when carrying down to the PDF. Everything populated to the landing page, but not being able to convert to a PDF was a deal breaker for the event manager, so she continued to manually create certificates. You could advise people to print as a PDF and then save to the file from the machine, but that's not a very user friendly approach. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hi,

You just need to ensure that the browser context (cookies, query string) is send to pdfMyURL and it works; pdfMyURL has a JS helper for this.

[jam_mkto_user1]

Good afternoon @SanfordWhiteman,

I appreciate this is an old post but I'm having the same difficulty as @Natalie_Kremer and am unable to obtain a personalised PDF. Aside from this, the remaining functionality is great and works but the personalisation element is essential. My sequence is:

• An event attendee receives a post-event email that contains a Marketo landing page URL.
• This LP contains a feedback form, generated in Marketo, prompting the recipient to provide an opinion on the success of the event.
• On submission of the form, a second Marketo landing page is presented, via the Follow-up type in the Edit Form settings,  and this last landing page contains Download Certificate URL to a 3rd landing page which is to act as the PDF certificate for the attendee to download.
• I have a trial licence currently for https://pdfmyurl.com/ which from what I've read on the site, should enable me to produced downloadable PDFs from a supplied LP URL. 
• I have configured the domain section of the trial account for my LP domain, info.companyname.com.
• The 'Download Certificate' link in the 2nd Marketo LP contains a link of the form, https://pdfmyurl.com/?url=https://info.companyname.com/03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html?##MKT_TOK## where the URL in bold is from the 3rd LP acting as the certificate to be dowloaded.
• There are two personalisation elements in the that landing page as displayed below:
• 
• Both are displayed as blank using the Download PDF link above.
• However, if I remove the pdfmyurl.com element and use https://info.companyname.com/03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html as the URL, the personalisation values are displayed
• 

@SanfordWhiteman, could you please review the above and let me know if I'm missing anything, particularly in reference to your reply recommending that the 'browser context (cookies, query string) is send to pdfMyURL and it works; pdfMyURL has a JS helper for this.' I didn't follow your suggestion here so any additional detail would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

[SanfordWhiteman]

• The 'Download Certificate' link in the 2nd Marketo LP contains a link of the form, https://pdfmyurl.com/?url=https://info.companyname.com/03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html?##MKT_TOK## where the URL in bold is from the 3rd LP acting as the certificate to be dowloaded.

---

You need to URL-encode the entire url query parameter. Also, just throwing in ##MKT_TOK# has no meaning here, you need to include

• mkt_tok = cached mkt_tok from the last email click
  
  and/or
  
  
• _mkt_trk = the current _mkto_trk cookie

[jam_mkto_user1]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman,

thank you for your feedback and apologies for the delay in responding, I've just returned from annual leave.

For the URL-encode suggestion, is the following sufficient:

 https://pdfmyurl.com/?url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Finfo.companyname.com%2F03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html

Regarding the ##MKT_TOK## could you please provide instruction on where I should obtain the cached mkt_tok from the last email click and/or the current _mkto_trk cookie. Once I have retrieve either of these values, are the following URLs the correct format:

https://pdfmyurl.com/?url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Finfo.companyname.com%2F03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html?mkt_tok=value to be inserted

 https://pdfmyurl.com/?url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Finfo.companyname.com%2F03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html?_mkt_trk=value to be inserted

Kind regards

Karl

[SanfordWhiteman]

---

For the URL-encode suggestion, is the following sufficient:

 https://pdfmyurl.com/?url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Finfo.companyname.com%2F03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html

---

No, you don’t encode the equals sign!

What you have there is just one long query param name.

---

Regarding the ##MKT_TOK## could you please provide instruction on where I should obtain the cached mkt_tok from the last email click and/or the current _mkto_trk cookie.

---

mkt_tok: read it from window.__mktTokVal, store it in local storage, read it from local storage.

_mkto_trk: read it from the cookie store like any other cookie!

---

Once I have retrieve either of these values, are the following URLs the correct format:

https://pdfmyurl.com/?url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Finfo.companyname.com%2F03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html?mkt_tok=value to be inserted

 https://pdfmyurl.com/?url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Finfo.companyname.com%2F03---202510-Region-Roadshow-Demo_05---Certificate.html?_mkt_trk=value to be inserted

No, those are not correct. Not only have you encoded the equals sign after url, query parameters must be separated with ampersands (&) not question marks (?). The first single question mark  starts the query string. All subsequent question marks are just literal characters.

A query string looks like

key=encoded%20value&anotherkey=another%20encoded%20value

(of course with a question mark prepended to separate it from the path part of the URL)

[Evelyne_Bessett]

Hi, has any new feature been added to Marketo to create event certificates, or should we still use PDFmyURL? Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

PDFMyURL is still the way.

[SanfordWhiteman]

How would you recommend we append the Lead Token to the URL?

Like this:

http://pdfmyurl.com?url=http://info.mheducation.com/Sample-Assets%3F##MKT_TOK##

[Natalie_Kremer]

Sanford, I've been testing this with pdfmyurl.com and am running into issues with the First and Last Name Tokens carrying over to the PDF download. The Event Name Token carries down, but the Lead Tokens do not. Have you run into this before?

[Natalie_Kremer]

This is super helpful since actually capturing the LP content was something I was struggling with. Thanks!