Visited Web Page Activity Not Logged when Email Clicked

[Anonymous]

An email was sent out on Friday and a lot of people responded by clicking a link in the email that took them to this Marketo landing page:

http://pages.usablenet.com/WC2016-05MobilePlaybook_RegistrationLP.html

The clicked link was logged successfully in each activity log. However, the Visited Webpage activity is not logged for the individual lead. This seems to be happening for leads that were not cookied and known prior to the email blast. Is there some timing thing that is happening here? Shouldn't leads that click the email become known and have the web activity for visited page logged? Any idea if this has to do with the undated Munchkin functionality?

Any insights appreciated.

Thanks,

Sheila

[Robb_Barrett]

Did they do anything after the click? if you look at the activity log, is it one click or multiple clicks?

You could be triggering link-checkers in email clients. These check to see where your links redirect to prior to delivering to end users. Tell tale signs include a flurry of clicks or clicks almost immediately after delivering with no VWP.

[Joey_Forcelli1]

Hey  Sheila,

Good to know.  For the email I recently deployed it was roughly 55% that weren't tracking.  Going to keep an eye on it.  Have you identified a easy method of gauging how many leads have click activity immediately after the send?

JF

[Joey_Forcelli1]

Hey Sheila,

I recently  experienced the same thing you explained above except I was driving clicks to our homepage (munchkin tracking was enabled and firing).  What percentage of your clicks would you say were impacted by this?  We had ~60% of leads that didn't have web activity tracked.

JF

[Anonymous]

For the particular email that initially got our attention, the percentage was really staggering ~90% showed the click but not the visit. Other ones have been a lower percentage (~30%). The one with the 90% was to a fairly small number of targeted enterprise emails so it isn't totally surprising now that I understand what is happening. The key for me was realizing the clicked link activity was logging immediately after the send email.

[Roxann_McGlump1]

Hi Sheila,

Did a lot of these no-visit email clicks come from the same organization?  And did the email clicks happen almost immediately on delivery?  If so, the email security software on the recipient servers may be link-testing, "clicking" the links in an automated fashion to confirm where they go, but since this is just an automated test, the page is never opened in a browser and a visit is never logged.  This document discusses this in more detail:  Understanding a Spike in Click Activity

[Anonymous]

Hi Roxann,

A lot of good insights on this thread.

Up until today, I was under the assumption that if we email to a lead/contact who is already in the system and has never filled out a form  to get cookied -

1. Marketo with the help of mkt token and munchkin will starting associating the email clicks and visits to an anonymous lead

2. When this lead finally fills out a form, Marketo will drop a cookie and then associate the information collected on the anonymous record with this "now-known" lead.

Does this still hold true? Because I am getting mixed reviews here.

Thanks & Appreciate your time!

Vishal

[SanfordWhiteman]

1. Marketo with the help of mkt token and munchkin will starting associating the email clicks and visits to an anonymous lead

No, the act of visiting a mkt_tok-enized link on a page that's running Munchkin (i.e. not a direct-downloaded PDF, since PDFs cannot run Munchkin) will either create+associate a cookie if none exists or associate an existing cookie.  There is no need to also fill out a form.  It wouldn't make sense to require continuous conversion. 

If a person fills out a form, that will also result in an associated cookie.

There are multiple different, but complementary paths to lead-session association.

[Anonymous]

Hi Roxanne,
Thanks so much for the input. It could explain the behavior I'm seeing - especially since the click is immediately on the send. The company has very recently done extensive work to improve deliverability by removing inactive leads and using a 3rd party to identify spam traps and removing them as well. Hopefully this will help.
Sheila

[Loren_Posendek]

Hi Sheila - I've been reading through this thread as I recently noticed the same thing you did — a difference in the number of records who "clicked" the link in the email that directs to the landing page versus the number of records who "viewed" the landing page.

I did go through some records to find that the activity data was as follows: Send Email, Clicked Link, Email Delivered with no "visit webpage" activity. I've read some other threads to learn this is associated to email security software. It does strike me as interesting though that so few records had "visited web page" activity. In my case, the only leads showing in the "visited web page" smart list are leads who actually filled out the form (even though the leads who clicked the link in the email are known). This may be completely accurate/true data, but qualifies under "things that make you go huh?"

Have you noticed if the appropriate activity data has appended to records moving forward?

[Anonymous]

Hi Loren,

The visited web page does show up for leads that filled out the form that's why initially I was thinking it had something to do with leads not being set to Known after clicking the link. But I do have some that get the visited web page and haven't filled out the form. For these it seems to be leads that are already known. However, that could be a coincidence since it isn't a big sample.

The other thing that was confusing me is it seemed to be happening much more frequently on emails with A/B tests. Emails with no A/B test had less disparity between the clicked link and visited page. However, the email formatting is different and the content is very different so that could also account for the difference. Next step is to look at replacing the email template being used as that might be causing some of the spam filters too.

[SanfordWhiteman]

But you can't solve this by changing layout.  The entire goal of link pre-fetching is to determine whether the destination of a link redirects to a malicious site, in order to protect against the exploitation of 0day (and older) security vulnerabilities and phishing scams.  It only works if this measure is run against every email, including those that perfectly echo the HTML of (for example) a PayPal or Amazon message, your own templates, or simple text.

Cleaning your list is always a good idea, but in general pre-fetching can only be skipped if a sending IP is specifically whitelisted, not simply not blacklisted. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford Whiteman​. Was reading some of your other posts on pre-fetching - really good stuff.

I had another question for you that got lost..

In terms of the forms 2.0 library not being loaded on Usablenet website, I need to try and address this with the website developers but I want to make sure I give them the right direction. When I look at the source code on the home page, I see that at line 613/614 they have the

<form id=mktoForm_1346"></form>

<form id=mktoForm_1338"></form>

and at line 643 is when they load the form library: <script src="http://app-sj04.marketo.com/js/forms2/js/forms2.js"></script>

Do they simply have to move line 613/614 below below line 643? Or do they need to do something more? Sorry if I'm asking a basic question. I know enough about this stuff to make it work in simple situations but they have much more complex code on this page. Thanks again for your help here.

Sheila

[SanfordWhiteman]

Unfortunately, it's more complex than that because they'd need to coordinate load order with several other actions.

[Loren_Posendek]

Thanks for the reply, Sheila. It sounds like our experiences are similar. What's interesting is that our sample size was smaller than normal, too. So that could account for the discrepancy in the numbers. We'll continue to monitor, but if we find that there's a more a definite solution/reason why it's happening, I'll be sure to share.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, as long as you have not disabled ​mkt_tok​ (this is non-default option for every link in an email) then a ​Clicked Email ​event will lead to a ​Visited Web Page ​event if the asset loads Munchkin. Make sure someone did not uncheck Include ​mkt_tok.

Munchkin 2.0 relates to anonymous leads, so those changes are not involved here.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford. You have confirmed my understanding.

I have verified that the email as Include mkt_tok checked.

The Clicked email event did come through.

The Visited Web Page event did not come through for those leads that weren't known before they clicked the link in the email.

Perhaps something is not right on the Marketo landing page? Link to that is in my original post.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Please send me (sandy@figureone.com) a copy of the email (not a sample but a real send).

[Anonymous]

Sanford Whiteman Sending the email shortly. Subject is "Are you happy with your mobile site's performance?". Thanks so much for helping to debug. Sheila

[SanfordWhiteman]

OK.  Found the email (it was in my spam quarantine ).

Following the tracked link, I do see the mkt_tok correctly appended to the URL by the tracking server. I also see the Munchkin hit successfully sent:

This step should suffice to associate the Munchkin cookie with the known Marketo lead (which is encoded in the mkt_tok).  I also navigated to your homepage and saw the same cookie value and another Visit Web Page hit as expected.  Can you send me a screenshot of my web activity log?

On what is perhaps a separate but important note, your "Request a Demo" and "Contact Us" links are both broken because you haven't correctly included Marketo Forms 2.0 on your corporate site.

I also see a common problem that is not directly related to tracking but which you really must fix to avoid placing unnecessary load on your server (and a seemingly long overall load time for your pages, even though it is not directly felt by users). The favicon.ico on your Marketo LP is redirecting to your homepage because you didn't specify a path to a existing file.  As a result your LP actually loads your corporate site's HTML 2x in the background.

[Anonymous]

Hi. Thanks for testing. For the email, your clicked link in email and also web page visit was recorded correctly. That's what I found when I tested. But last Friday when the email went out, we had 266 leads that clicked the link in the email but yet never had a visited web page activity recorded. Maybe we just have to chalk this up to something with the rollout of the new release? It's just not clear why the issue happened. I would hate to think that the leads that clicked the link never actually got to view the landing page. But I guess it is possible that the Marketo servers were so busy that the page didn't come up. FYI, nothing has changed in the email or on the landing page so it isn't anything with how it was setup.

In terms of the "Request a Demo" and "Contact Us" forms being broken, can you please tell me why you think this is true? Tests with submitting the forms have worked doing exactly what is expected in the system. So just trying to understand why you believe they aren't working when we are seeing leads come through.

Thanks too for the hint on the favicon. I'll get that fixed asap.

Regards,

Sheila