Re: Webinar Registration Triggering the Submission of Incorrect Form

Kelly_Gault1

Has anyone dealt with a situation where the wrong form is being submitted when people register for something on your website?

We have seen both of the following:

-One form is submitted from a specific referrer and it is not the form on that referring page

-Two forms are submitted at the same time. One of the forms is the correct form and the other form is incorrect.

My sense is that this is an issue with Contentful, our CMS, but they haven't offered much assistance in investigating the issue, so I thought I would reach out to see if anyone else has seen something similar. We haven't been able to replicate it and I can only learn so much when digging into individual Marketo person records once we see someone has been affected by this. Any help is greatly appreciated!

SanfordWhiteman

It’s simple.

You visit this page and fill out the form:

https://www.confluent.io/resources/online-talk/how-to-build-event-driven-microservices/

When thank you message (not actually a separate page) appears, you click on the link to the webinar collection:

https://www.confluent.io/online-talks/?language=english&session_ref=direct

From the webinar collection, you select the link to Build Event-Driven Microservices with Apache Kafka®...

https://www.confluent.io/resources/how-to-build-event-driven-microservices-with-kafka-kotlin-ktor/

But — here’s the key! — at no point in the above navigation did the main document actually reload from the server. Instead, your site is substituting content in the document and replace()-ing the URL — i.e., a Single-Page App (SPA).

So because the forms library never reloaded, it kept the original _mktoReferrer value. I wrote a blog post about this exact case:

Keeping the Marketo forms Referrer value (_mktoReferrer) updated on SPAs

By the way, I notice you’re using the old version of SimpleDTO. You need to update to SimpleDTO 2 as of 2023.

View solution in original post

SanfordWhiteman

Can you link to the page please? Bet there's more than one form and some are hidden.

It's impossible for a page to hallucinate that it has certain form ID.

Kelly_Gault1

Well, we made an interesting discovery after my last post. We were able to replicate one of the issues we're seeing.

Here is what we are seeing:

1. We submit our upcoming webinar form (ID 4248) on this page https://www.confluent.io/resources/online-talk/how-to-build-event-driven-microservices/ and the form fill comes through as expected in Marketo. Correct form/correct referrer.

2. On the thank you page, there is a link to our on-demand webinar page. We navigate to that page and pick one of the on-demand webinars to register for. When we get to the landing page for an on-demand webinar, we are presented with our on-demand webinar form (ID 3762) but it displays a custom message because I'm a known user. That page is: https://www.confluent.io/resources/online-talk/build-a-streaming-data-mesh/ and here is a screenshot of the form with the custom message:

3. If I select "Not you" and fill out the form manually, then the form submission comes through in Marketo as expected (correct form/correct referrer). However, if I just click "Submit", the filled out form activity in Marketo comes through with the wrong referrer. The form is correct, but the referrer is https://www.confluent.io/resources/online-talk/how-to-build-event-driven-microservices/ rather than https://www.confluent.io/resources/online-talk/build-a-streaming-data-mesh/.

Have you ever seen something like this happen when a custom message is displayed for a known user?

Anyway, our original interpretation of the situation was wrong. It doesn't appear that the wrong form is being submitted from the right URL--we now think that the right form is being submitted, but the referrer isn't being captured correctly. Our Web Dev team says that the information they are seeing in Segment confirms this new interpretation of the situation.

Important side note: to answer your earlier question, we DO have more than one form on the page. We actually have TEN 😑 I'm not involved with this initiative, so my understanding is limited, but we used to use Optimizely for form testing and I guess we needed to have all of the forms they potentially wanted to test listed as hidden forms. We are no longer using Optimizely, so our Web Dev team said they can remove these forms. I think the custom message for known users is the culprit, but... this definitely seemed relevant, so I thought I better provide an explanation for why we have SO many forms.

Thank you so much for any help you can offer!

SanfordWhiteman