Lead source attribution via multiple pages tagged with the same munchkin

Hi Amy,

There are 2 different notions that are stored in Marketo : the referrer and the lead source.

Since the munchkin is on the non Marketo LP, Marketo will detect the referrer on this first visible page and set it either FaceBook or LinkedIn as the person has arrived from there (Referrers are complete URLs)

For the lead source, things are much more complicated. 2 ways :

• You can set it with a smart campaign that analyses the referrer and fills it. This is easy but is not fully reliable : you cannot be sure that the referrer has been captured when the visitor arrived on you non Marketo LP. It can be older if the visitor already existed in your database.
• You can try to capture it in a hidden field on the forms on your Marketo LPs.
  Hidden fields can capture URL parameters values, referrer parameters values or cookie values. In your case, as the Marketo landing pages are not the first ones that the visitor sees, the 2 first options (url parameter and referrer parameter) would not work. This leaves the cookie approach. It will require that you write a small javascript that collects the referrer of the non Marketo page, computes the source and writes it in a session cookie that you will be able to read in from the form in your non Marketo LP.

-Greg

There are many, many threads on this topic, so please do a search for them to understand what Gregoire discusses and how to put it together.

Amy, once you've delved deeply into Greg's comments (and Josh's recommendation to get more info via Community search). you might want to devalue (or always clarify) the word "referrer" in your work.  I'm not talking here about the conceptual "referring site," but the true HTTP referrer header.  The reason is that the referrer is simply not available in many cases. A prime example is when the referring site is served over HTTPS but your site is served over simple HTTP.  Even if you had a form capable of reading out the referrer, it wouldn't see anything to read.  This security restriction is standard for the modern web.

The above does not apply to the best practice of embedding a source identifier in the URL itself, because that's not technically the referrer, it's just part of the URL.  For example, if all the links on LinkedIn have ?source=li, then the destination page can simply read the value of the query param source.  This'll work even if someone came from linkedin.com to example.com?source=li.  We might still casually call LinkedIn the "referrer" in this case, but I think it's better to call it the link source or similar.

Anyway, the real reason I got into all that is that, since the query string carries the most reliable source info, you might consider simply transferring (copying) the query string onto the links to each of your Marketo forms. So if I come to your non-Marketo LP with ?source=li, then append ?source=li to your form links.  It will require some simple JavaScript, but less code than the cookie approach.  Then the form on your Marketo LP can use the standard hidden field autofill mechanism: autofill from query param.

Easier still, if your non-Marketo LP reliably passes itself as the referrer to your Marketo LP, in this specific sequence you can rely on the referrer being present.  So pass the source like ?source=li above, then have the form on the Marketo LP autofill from referrer.  By default, you'd be storing the full link like example.com/?source=li, example.com/?source=tumblr, etc. (you could easily trim it down on form submit, but then you're back in JavaScript-land again).