Wistia videos with Marketo web forms embedded on non-Marketo landing pages pulling in a wistia URL as the original referrer. Why?

[Cayce_Armstrong]

We use Wistia videos embedded on our non-Marketo landing pages, some of which include a Marketo web form that collects contacts and syncs into Marketo via the Wistia connector. 

I noticed that the Original Referred for some, but not all, of these contacts lists a Wistia URL rather than the URL of our website on which the video is embedded. I can't figure out why this is happening. Does anyone else using the Wistia Connector have this issue and know how to fix it?

[SanfordWhiteman]

If the video embed had to switch to an IFRAME (instead of an inline <video> tag) because of browser capabilities, then the document URL would be the IFRAME's URL (i.e. one level deeper than expected).

I assume this disparity as at the core.

[Cayce_Armstrong]

Thanks Sanford Whiteman‌ - that certainly sounds like a reasonable explanation. This type of thing is outside of my area of expertise, so I apologize ahead of time for my ignorance, but if the browser doesn't have the capabilities for an inline video and has to switch to an IFRAME, do you know of any workaround I might try to still be able to capture which of our web pages these contacts are actually being referred from?

[SanfordWhiteman]

I wonder if your outer page isn't loading Munchkin consistently for some reason (which would have similar symptoms).

[Cayce_Armstrong]

I have no idea if that's the case but I've heard Wistia has good customer support so I may reach out to them to see if they've heard of this issue before and have a solution. Thanks so much for your input on this and if I can get a solution from Wistia, I'll post an update.

[Cayce_Armstrong]

Hi Sanford Whiteman‌ - In case you're interested, I contact Wistia directly about my Original Referrer being recorded as a fast.wistia.net URL and it turns out that on some of our pages, we were using their "fallback iframe embed code" rather than their "standard inline embed code." I checked with our website team and apparently we used the iFrame code because, after Wistia updated their video embed codes a while back, the updated codes didn't work correctly on our web pages. (We use a CMS built by a local developer vs a widely used CMS and to get the updated, standard embed codes to work correctly, we would have needed the developer to update his script, which costs money, and was determined not necessary at the time.)

Below is what Wistia's support told me (which I see you were a contributor in the recommended thread they gave me about Original Referrer in Marketo  😞

For most of our embeds, E-v1.js is essential for the Wistia player to function. When a webpage loads, E-v1.js needs to be there to build the player, deliver your video files and thumbnail, and include any customizations or plugins you’ve chosen for the video. (Our fallback iframe code is an exception to this) It also controls any integrations you have set up for lead capture and tracking, and much more. We recommend adding this script to your page as a first troubleshooting step. 

In Marketo the Original Referrer is the URL the lead came from when they were first created by Munchkin as an anonymous lead. Munchkin is thinking that the form submission is happening at the iframe URL since the form is in the player
I'd also recommend this thread for additional details:
https://nation.marketo.com/thread/40147-original-referrer-whats-it-really-for

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yep, sounds like my original supposition.