How do I create gated content accessible by filling out a form? | Community
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A
Anonymous
February 17, 2017
Question

How do I create gated content accessible by filling out a form?

  • February 17, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 4945 views

We want to drive whitepaper downloads through social media and be able to collect email addresses, name, company etc. from a form that has to be filled out to gain access to the papers. Also, we do not want for it to be a URL that can be forwarded and give instant access to anyone who clicks, we want for anyone viewing the whitepapers to have filled out a contact form. IT should run similarly to this: Rapid Application Delivery Platform for the Enterprise | OutSystems 

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3 replies

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
February 17, 2017

Please move the thread to Products and someone will answer it there. "Community" is for website feedback, not product support -- and yes, this is confusing!

Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10
February 17, 2017

There's a brief discussion here on how to prevent those that didn't register to have access to a confirmation/thank-you page: Block from accessing a Thank-You page/confirmation page directly

A
Anonymous
February 17, 2017

So from that it looks like there is no way to create a page that can only be accessed by filling out a form.. that’s disappointing

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
February 17, 2017

There's actually no such thing (anywhere on the web) as a page that [a] doesn't require pre-shared authentication, i.e. username and password or some kind of signature, yet [b] can't be accessed by someone who knows the full URL.

You can definitely prevent casual visitors from happening upon a Thank You page without filling out a form first: check to see if the referrer URL is the LP.  But a malicious visitor can just forge their referrer... that's just browser reality.

A
Anonymous
February 20, 2017

Hi Emily Stone , we all deal with this question, and it's best to address it in a way that's not a nuisance to users. A 403 access denied error usually means they'll just give up, rather than go out of their way to find your landing page and convert.

1 thing to always keep in mind, people will send your whitepaper (PDF, usually) to other people more often than they send a link to a landing page. That means you really want your PDF to end with a call to action directing interested readers to visit a web page with another piece of valuable content where some of them might convert.

I also ended up developing my own tool (product now), which tracks every page on our site being emailed or skyped. In practice, this means that someone emailing our whitepaper page to a coworker flags in my system as person A referring content X to person B. While I may not have person B in my Marketo database, that flow of information (referral of content to more appropriate person) is much more valuable to my sales team than just another name on the WP conversion campaign.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
February 20, 2017

Hi Emily Stone , we all deal with this question, and it's best to address it in a way that's not a nuisance to users. A 403 access denied error usually means they'll just give up, rather than go out of their way to find your landing page and convert.

But who said anything about a 403?

I also ended up developing my own tool (product now), which tracks every page on our site being emailed or skyped. In practice, this means that someone emailing our whitepaper page to a coworker flags in my system as person A referring content X to person B.

"Person B" will be anonymous if you're not re-gating the content, so sounds like you're logging the out-of-band pageviews of a unique URL (i.e. a page that cannot exist in any other context but lead-specific Form → Thank You).

A
Anonymous
February 20, 2017

Person B will be anonymous (unless converted at another time). I'm just saying that for many of these forwards, we accepted the fact that any additional gating would just frustrate our users, particularly the ones who haven't themselves committed to digging up a piece of content.

This is why we're "settling" and simply tracking which one of our converted visitors sent some of our content to a colleague. Rather than having nothing, we get a point of interest to score and for sales to (possibly) follow up on.

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