Level 3

Question

Multiple identical form fills in campaign

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
May 25, 2018
3 replies
7109 views

Hi community

We are currently running a campaign which allows leads to fill out a form to receive information on their preferred study option. I've noticed that 10 leads have filled out the form twice, but haven't changed their study option preference so have basically submitted the exact same form values twice. This doesn't always happen in quick succession - 7 of the 10 re-submitted hours or even days apart, and 3 leads submitted the same form within the same minute. One lead also had three separate form fills days apart with the exact same lead values for a completely different campaign.

I don't think there is a bot at play here, as I have checked each of the submissions and they are all from the same IP address and user agent. They are all from mobile though, so I'm wondering whether it's possible that the forms have have inadvertently been re-submitted somehow at a later date from the same mobile browser? The landing page redirects to a thank you page on submission, so I'm not sure how that would even be possible but it's the only thing I can think of.

The landing page is completely standard, no Javascript. All form fields are pre-fill enabled, so leads can see what they submitted previously if they are cookied and visit the form again.

I would love to limit the number of times leads can pass through the campaign, but I can't. There are genuine cases where leads will submit the form more than once with different lead values.

The only other possible reason for this is just actual, weird behaviour: people resubmitting pre-filled forms with exactly the same values because they feel like it.

Has anybody else experienced something similar?

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SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

Need the URL.

Diana_Watts3Author

Level 3

info.aut.ac.nz/postgraduate-study.html

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

I don't see anything here that would lead to duplicate form fills. As you point out, there isn't any Forms 2.0 JS, which is where I'd typically expect to find the cause. (There's always JS powering any Forms 2.0 form, and you can mess it up any number of ways via 3rd-party scripts, even scripts that don't seem form-related -- but again, not here.)

Are you sure you're not having a problem following up on form fills (i.e. alert campaigns, program sorting, etc.) so people convert again because they don't hear back from you?

Certainly using Pre-Fill makes a repeated form fillout easier to do.

Amit_Jain

Community Advisor

Its bit tricky but I guess you can do it by adding some custom JavaScript code on your form. Take a look on the following post:

How to use custom HTML with a Marketo Form | webSIGHTdesigns

As you can see, you can create your own form in custom HTML and then populate and submit the marketo form using Javascript. So what you can do is, as following:

Create a marketo form with all the fields required like FirstName, Last Name, email addresses and question
Make all these fields hidden and make sure to enable pre-fill for these fields. So in case of the user has already submitted the form, the browser must already have the cookie in place. So you will have the values in these hidden fields that user submitted previously.
Create your own Form in HTML as described in the above post
Upon Custom form submission, compare the values that you have in your marketo hidden fields and in the custom form
If there is a difference in the value of any of the field, update the marketo form hidden fields with the new values and submit the form
Otherwise prevent the marketo form from being submitted and show an alert/re-direct to a page with a message that you already have this information.

I haven't tried this but let me know if this helps.

Regards,

Amit

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

This doesn't have anything to do with the problem domain.

Even if you wanted to forcibly stop the Marketo form from submitting with unchanged values -- which is a bad idea, as resubmitting is a valid case that shouldn't be blocked outright -- building an *entire other form* in raw HTML is unnecessary.

Victor_Herrero

Level 5

Hi @diana_watts3,

I'm having the same or a very similar problem. Lately we are seeing people submitting from the same countries, same type of form and landing page and it's creating several records simultaneously (same minute, don't have more granularity). The record is now at 15.

It's strange because we are unable to reproduce the issue. Developers looked at it and couldn't find anything. They suspect maybe very slow connections can lead to subsequent submissions. To me this seems like a technical problem. 15 submissions in the same minute (probably second, since Marketo was unable to dedupe on exact email match...).

Even with form pre-fill, which no longer works, it should not be possible. Last time we had something similar was a faulty integration that posted twice. Only in this case it's a form submission...

Did you and Sanford figure it out?

Diana_Watts3Author

Level 3

Hi @victor_herrero

I never got to the bottom of this sorry - it was a really strange one. It sounds like you've having a similar problem! Have Marketo Support been able to provide any insight?

Victor_Herrero

Level 5

Hi @diana_watts3 ,

The reply I got from them was that Marketo simply received several requests from the client side and just processed them normally. It just so happens that the requests all had an identical timestamp.

That explains why the automatic dedupe rule was unable to catch the duplicates: 15 checks fired at the same time, but no record was on database at the time the checks were made, so 15 identical copies were flagged as OK and pushed into the CRM.

To me it sounds like there is some room for improvement there ...

How the real person was able to make that many legit form submissions is also unclear... one hypothesis has been a slow connection or some front-end problem led the persons to click on submit several times. Not sure how it's possible for someone to click 15 times in one second, so probably a slow connection or some other hiccup queued the submissions and sent them all through at once? Maybe a bot?

I don't know enough to understand. @sanfordwhiteman maybe you have come across something like this and have an idea of how it might happen? All our cases were LATAM or South Africa, so maybe infrastructure played a role? I also don't want to make assumptions about that really.

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