Lead Tracking and Multiple Domains

January 13, 2015 | by

Marketo’s Munchkin tracking code helps you track visits to your web site. You’re likely to want to use Munchkin tracking code to cookie anonymous leads for most or all of the pages on your website. Let’s walk through how Munchkin works.

Visits to the page are recorded for existing leads, and a visit to the page by a non-cookied visitor will cause a new cookie to be created and stored, and a new anonymous lead to be created in your Marketo database. The Munchkin-tracker will automatically cookie a visitor if they don’t already have an existing cookie for the current domain. In Marketo, it logs the event (click link, visit web page, or new lead) in the lead’s Activity Log. The value stored within the cookie is unique for a given visitor. The value is a combination of the unique Munchkin account tracking id, domain name, time stamp and random integer.

What happens if I have multiple domains?
Lets say you have two sites that you would like to track: www.apples.com and www.bananas.com. You can put the tracking code on both sites, however you need to consider the following. Marketo cookies are ‘first-party cookies’ and are therefore domain specific.

This means that a visitor to site 1 will be created as an anonymous lead in Marketo, if that same lead then goes to site 2 this will create a second separate anonymous lead in Marketo. If the lead fills out a form on site 1 then this record will become known, the anonymous record for site 2 will remain and continue to accumulate subsequent visits to that site. If the lead then goes on to fill out a form on site 2 with the exact same email address as used on site 1, then both known leads will merge automatically and all past and future behavior will be tracked on one single record in Marketo. Both cookie IDs are tied to the same lead and all web activity (from either domain) will be on that lead.

What about multiple subdomains?
Subdomains are not an issue. Let’s use use Marketo.com as an example. It has multiple subdomains for different languages, such as fr.marketo.com and de.marketo.com.
With subdomains all activity will be recorded against the same lead record/cookie.