Difference between Referrer constraint vs Web Page constraint for form fill out?

How do you use Marketo forms in WordPress right now?

Are you embedding Marketo froms within WordPress page?

or

are you using any WordPress plugin?

or

Are you using iframe?

or

Are you 'loading' Marketo forms using Forms 2.0 javascript call?

Is there any URL you can share?

This sort of information can be useful to be able to help effectively.

Rajesh

We use this same approach across hundreds of our programs.  Since we use a common form on our gated content pages (on our website, not Marketo LPs), we need to constrain this by the landing page, e.g.:

I just checked some active campaigns and it's working fine.  I've never heard that the constraint for "Web Page is" is only for Marketo landing pages.

-Why is this suddenly an issue? -Why does it seem to work for some leads? -What is the actual difference between these two constraints?

Without looking at your actual URLs, I can't say whether anything unexpected happened.  But I agree with Support that Referrer is the preferred constraint for embedded forms.

This is not to say that Web Page does not also work, but for non-Marketo URLs it enforces an exact match on the hostname+pathname+hash, which is not so for Marketo LPs  For example, the constraint

     Web Page [is] s.example.com/mypage.html

will match

     http://s.example.com/mypage.html?qs=1

but it will not match

     http://s.example.com/mypage.html?qs=1#0AEDC

Contrast this with a constraint by Marketo LP friendly name

     Web Page [is] My Landing Page 02

which will match

     http://s.example.com/lp02

     http://s.example.com/lp02.html

     http://s.example.com/lp02.html#0AEDC

     http://s.anotherlandingpagedomain.com/lp02.html

and will also match if you change the URL.

In other words, even though it's expressed as an [is] match, with a Marketo LP it's flexible across branding domains and hashes.

Referrer, on the other hand, treats the entire referrer URL as an opaque string and allows for partial matches. So

     Referrer [starts with] http://s.example.ccom

will not match

    https://s.example.com/mypage.html

while

     Referrer [contains] mypage.html

will match

     http://s.example.com/mypage.html

     http://s.example.net/deeplinks/mypage.html

They both have their uses, but I don't find an exact page match without the query string to be something I run into too often.  More often I want to catch a certain form across an entire domain, or the query string itself, or something within the path (like a language).

Referrer (in Marketo) = the URL of the page where the form lives and was submitted, even on non-Marketo pages like WordPress. Surprisingly, it is the more reliable constraint for embedded forms.

Web Page = only works consistently when the form is filled out on a Marketo-hosted landing page. This field is often blank or misreported when forms are embedded on external pages due to how Marketo tracks its assets vs. external environments.

To your specific questions:

• Why this is an issue now? This may be due to a recent change in how your WordPress pages load the embed code, a plugin or theme update, or browser privacy.

• Why some leads qualify and others don’t? Different browsers, ad blockers, privacy settings, or how fast the script loads can impact whether Marketo captures the “Web Page” info accurately.

• Why Referrer works better? On non-Marketo pages, Referrer ends up being the best proxy for “where the form was filled out” because it's populated based on how the JavaScript embed is interpreted, whereas Web Page expects a Marketo-hosted environment.

Let me know if this helps. I was quite surprised when I found this out too.  😀