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Ishani_DePillo1
Ishani_DePillo1
Level 2
April 30, 2015
Question

original referral is our site

  • April 30, 2015
  • 8 replies
  • 3178 views
We get a handful of leads every week that have the original referral link as our own site.  Any ideas why this is happening?

The lead source is set to unknown.

When I check activity for the lead, and double click on the first page they visited, a pop up appears showing the referral link as another page on the site. So I'm wondering why that referral link doesn't show up on the lead activity page. Any ideas? 
 
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8 replies

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
April 30, 2015
can you post a screenshot?

Referrer usually is more hidden, so I'm not sure what the issue is. Lots of records will have Referrer=yoursite.com because they probably visited another page or the system could not identify another site.
Ishani_DePillo1
Ishani_DePillo1Author
Level 2
April 30, 2015
Ishani_DePillo1
Ishani_DePillo1Author
Level 2
April 30, 2015
Hi Josh, 

I clicked on the very first activity to see where the lead was coming from. and it says it's from a blog post on our site. But the blog post is not registered on activity log.  Shouldn't the blog URL register on the activity log? 

Thank you,
Ishani
SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
May 1, 2015
@Ishani if the blog is not running Munchkin, no. In that case the first recognized page view will be the one resulting from the blog click as it will only be registered on the target page. 
Ishani_DePillo1
Ishani_DePillo1Author
Level 2
May 1, 2015
Hi Sanford, I should have clarified. The blog has the munchkin code. The entire site (including subdomains) contain munchkin. 
SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
May 1, 2015
OK. Without a deeper look into your site and real-time access to the Activity Log, I can't explain the absence of Visited Web Page activities on your blog pages.  One would have to do a lot of cross-browser testing as I don't think it's happening everywhere.  If I were you I'd compare the same traffic over http: and https:. (Not telling you not to use https: in production, but it can be difficult to control your variables when you also have certificates in the mix -- i.e. to view secure traffic you need to use a proxy, and therefore you're not representing the real user experience.)

Munchkin is difficult to debug and I probably do it more than anyone outside of Marketo (having been bitten by missing activities last year I was assigned to actually learn the internals, to my dismay).

There could also be a simple solution that we're missing, but I don't know what.
Ishani_DePillo1
Ishani_DePillo1Author
Level 2
May 1, 2015
Thanks Sanford. Marketo team have been looking in to it as well, but haven't been able to figure out what's going on.  They've escalated the case to engineering now in hopes of finding a solution.  Keeping my fingers crossed. thank you for your time. 
 
SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
May 2, 2015
OK, please post back when you get it because I like to file away all the possible points of Munchkin failure.
Justin_Norris1
Justin_Norris1
Level 10
May 16, 2015

I am troubleshooting this issue as well. @Ishani DePillo​, did you get any feedback from engineering?

To be honest, I have seen a lot of unpredictability in the original referrer field over time -- from it not populating at all, to sometimes picking up the actual referring page from the third party site to often picking up the initial landing page on the Marketo-tagged site. Sometimes I have tested identical scenarios and gotten different results each time.

It makes it difficult to rely upon.

A
Anonymous
August 11, 2015

When we migrated from Pardot to Marketo, we had a similar issue and it ended up being some scripts on the site we had running in the background were interfering with marketo munchkin code from running, or making the munchkin run slower and by the time the user clicks to another page, we lose that original referrer and end up with our own site as the referrer, which was wrong. Once we identified the problem scripts and cleaned them up, munchkin does run much smoother and quicker, and we are able to identify our referring urls much more accurately, but we still do have that problem about 10% of the time. :/  I think it loads a little slower than the Pardot code for whatever reason.

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