Marketo Munchkin: The Key to Converting Visitors to Potential Buyers

Driving business growth by delivering personalized content to customers is an uphill battle for marketers. However, if Marketo is your preferred marketing automation platform, you’ve already won half the battle.

Are you using it right to convert the anonymous website visitors into buyers?

Enter – Marketo’s custom JavaScript code (Munchkin cookie).

It enables you to track the end-users activities like page visits to your landing pages and monitors the clicks to external web pages.

In this blog post, we’ll talk more about Munchkin, its types, and how it helps marketers to create more targeted campaigns.

What is Munchkin and How Does it Help Marketers?

Marketo’s Munchkin is a custom JavaScript tracking code that tracks all the individuals who visit your website. This way, you can respond to their visits with automated marketing campaigns. Marketo Munchkin can automatically identify if the user’s browser has a Munchkin cookie and if not, it can create one by itself.

Here’s how it can help marketers.

• Use it to send personalized messages to those anonymous visitors based on their activities, IP addresses, and other information.
• Target customers, by focusing on location, device, and timing.
• Leverage prospect data provided by Munchkin to curate engaging content to delight your customers.
• Marketo automatically provides pre-configured tracking code snippets to embed code on your external pages. It will track activity back to your Marketo instance.

Types of Munchkin Tracking Codes

And there’s not just one Munchkin Code, based on the type of impact you want to create around web page loading, you can choose from three types of Munchkin tracking codes. The three types are:

• Simple Code: Simple code is used to load the jQuery library each time a web page is loaded. It has the minimum number of lines of code and does not optimize for web page loading time.
• Asynchronous Code: Once the webpage has loaded, asynchronous code checks for the jQuery library and uses it for tracking code besides decreasing webpage loading time.
• Asynchronous jQuery: This code can be your best bet when it comes to reducing webpage loading time and enhancing system performance. However, the code will work only if you already have jQuery installed.

The Release of CNAME Cloaking Defense in Safari and Its Impact on Munchkin

In late 2020, Apple announced its intent on CNAME cloaking defense (CNAME cloaking is a method that uses DNS (domain name system) to disguise a third-party tracker as a first-party tracker. It is a way to circumvent ad blockers by assigning a subdomain for data collection and tracking.

This feature is designed to limit the lifespan of cookies set by hosts which have a CNAME pointing to a domain name that does not match the visited page’s domain name to seven days.

Since Munchkin JavaScript uses cookies set by a CNAME and the underlying host to which the CNAME (your instance.mktoweb.com), points will never match the domain name of a visited page that will curb the cookies set by Munchkin in Safari 14 browser to a seven-day lifespan. Now, many marketers will find themselves getting back to basics because it can impact your lead tracking process and web tracking behaviors.

How, you ask?

If old users do not visit your website within seven days, they will be considered new users. It will impact your marketing efforts because it leads to an unrealistic increase in new users reported, ultimately, difficulty in attributing conversions and retargeting.

The Bottom Line

Marketo Munchkin enables marketers to identify and convert qualified leads. However, for the aforementioned challenge, there is no easy solution, but Marketo is focusing on its efforts to integrate Marketo web tracking with the Adobe web SDK so that all their customers can benefit from their best-in-class web tracking solution.

Wish to Enhance Your Marketing Efforts With Marketo Engage? Let’s talk!