When does a Cookie meet and match it's lead?

[Anonymous]

I imported approx 8k leads, with 600 being brand new and the rest previously existed in our DB since September 19th (from another list import). As a whole, they have taken little action across our landing pages, emails, or demand gen engine, however approx 7500 were send a newsletter email last month.

Since these leads are in our DB, they technically qualify as "known?" My question is if they visit a Marketo Landing page, will that action be tracked/linked with the correct lead? We are targeting that import via a Linkedin Ad Campaign. From the Linkedin ads, we are driving them to a Marketo Landing Page, if they click the CTA button they are routed to a 2nd Thank you Landing Page.

Will I be able to set up a listening campaign that triggers on "Visits Web Page" = 2nd Thank you Landing Page to capture the leads that successfully engage with the ad campaign without a form? or does the CTA need to feature a form to connect the web page visit with the lead that already exists in our Database?

Thank you for any insight!!

Sonia

[SanfordWhiteman]

Please move the question to Products and I'll answer it there (this area is for questions about the Nation/Community website, not the Marketo product).

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford, moved.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

OK, here are your answers:

• Yes, every lead in your database is known, by definition (and the definitions can be confusing). Usually, we care more about known-ness from the browser side.
• A Munchkin cookie always sends activities to Marketo (as long as JS is enabled) and those activities can either be associated with a known lead or not at any point in time. (You can rephrase "not" as associated with an anonymous lead, since technically this is true, but there are growing differences between anonymous, er, things and known leads, so it might be better to just say "not.")
• A given activity can move from being not associated with a known lead, to being associated with known lead A, to being associated with known lead B, and back to A, over time (while rare, this kind of movement can cause madness in longitudinal reporting).
• In order for activities to be associated with a known lead, one of the following must occur:
  • The lead follows a link from a Marketo-generated email with the mkt_tok attached to the query string (this is the default for tracked links).
  • The lead fills out a form (possibly creating a new lead as well as associating with that lead).
  • Your page automatically submits a form in the background. This can be useful in cases where the URL contains the email address, but the email was not sent via Marketo, so association.would not be automatic but can be easily simulated.
  • Your page uses the Munchkin associateLead function to tie together a session with an existing or new lead. This underused function is for cases where, for example, your CMS knows who someone is based on some other form of authentication like a portal login. Another case where I've used this method is when sends are going out from a 3rd-party agency/server and you don't want to append the literal email address in the URL because it looks too obvious (I don't really care about this, but some do).
  • Your webserver uses a server-side form post to simulate the lead filling out a form (not recommended and deprecated). This is also the way integrations like Twitter Cards work.
  • Your webserver or other apps use a Marketo REST or SOAP API call (syncLead/associateLead/pushLead). These methods are not recommended unless your architecture strictly requires them.

So the overall takeaway is that if the link that someone follows to your site doesn't contain one of the types of lead-specific information, and they do not identify themselves via form fillout, they will not be associated.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sanford, thank you for the above post super helpful! We have a couple instance though, where if you fill out a form and then browse pages this does not get automatically tracking in the lead's history. Is it still true that: "In order for activities to be associated with a known lead, one of the following must occur: The lead fills out a form (possibly creating a new lead as well as associating with that lead)". Specifically, that if you are using marketo embedded forms on a non-marketo landing page, does the form fill associate the lead's browsing activity after the form fill? It does not seem to work for us. Many thanks! Linda Timo Reimann​

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, this works identically on a non-Marketo page with an embedded form.

Of course the user must allow cookies (not enable Tracking Protection or equivalent browser plugins). What is an example URL where you're hosting an embedded form?

[Anonymous]

For example this page: https://www.spratings.com/en_US/email-us  form fill creates a Filled out form log but no page views logs. thanks!  Timo Reimann​

[SanfordWhiteman]

There's no Marketo form on that page, only a (rather mangled) attempt to use a custom HTML form directly with the Marketo forms endpoint.

It's not surprising that it's not working, because you really have to know what you're doing to put that together (and in this case it definitely is not cross-browser compatible).

The correct way to integrate a custom form with the Marketo forms infrastructure is to use a hidden Marketo form and post it in the background.

[Anonymous]

Cool thanks a lot! We'll let you how it goes, but going to suggest this http://developers.marketo.com/blog/make-a-marketo-form-submission-in-the-background/

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, that's the baseline approach.

[Josh_G]

Hey Sanford,

I've looked at that doc many times and I find it frustrating it doesn't include an example for triggering off a basic POST for the visible form, nor does include how to pass the user inputs from the visible form to the Marketo form.

The code presented uses pre-defined hidden field values for submission rather than user inputs.

This information would be enough for skilled devs, but for code monkeys like myself I need more!

Any chance you could direct me to a resource that would explain that, or could you show me a quick sample?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Here's a brief(ish) example of an HTML form, with several different native input types, that's mapped to a hidden Marketo form on the HTML form's submit event:

     MktoForms2 :: Basic HTML form to Marketo form

On the left-hand side is the HTML form, on the right-hand side the Marketo form.

To make the demo more informative, I've set the Marketo form to opacity:.5 rather than full display:none which you'd use in production. I also added all the fields to the Marketo form in Form Editor as type Text: this wasn't necessary for the code to work, as they'll be added to the field as type Hidden automatically if they don't exist, but by making them visible you can see them update live.

When you press Submit on the HTML side, the Marketo side grabs the HTML values and maps them to their Marketo equivalents (for example, a set of <input type="checkbox"> with the same name becomes a multivalued semicolon-delimited string field for Marketo).

As you can see, the HTML side uses the native required attribute to prevent submission. There are other bells and whistles, including the use of a custom Event, which probably won't make sense until you get quite a bit more experience with JavaScript in the browser.

If you have more questions on this, please open a new thread as it really isn't pertinent to the old thread's topic.

[Anonymous]

This was really helpful and answered a nagging question in the back of my head for awhile now. Thank you!!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Great, Zach. If you have any other Munchkin Qs feel free to DM me... I want to consolidate a lot of this on my blog (as usual, when I have time!).

[Anonymous]

Thank you! You're a superstar.