I am looking for the solution in the case other people's information being displayed on a page/form if an original email is forwarded.
Q. If we use both PURL and cookie, how it works together?
In my understanding, when a contact(who receives a forwarded email) clicks the PURL(which is based on an original recipient) and then click-though with data lookup (which means he accesses to the webpage including data lookup coding), the form is prepopulated with the contact's profile.
This case is applied for both a known visitor and unknown visitor.
If we use data lookup also, 1. a form can pre-populate the original receipient's information even the case when the original receipient does not have the cookie, and 2. a form will not display the original receipient's information when a unknown visitor accesses or different contact visits via PURL.
Is my understanding correct?
I heard it is generally not common to have a web data lookup on a PURL page though...
In my understanding, there are 3 ways to specify a contact.
1. Recipient ID
- If someone clicks through from an email to a form and that form was forwarded to them, the form will have the original recipient of the email’s information. In this case even though they have their cookie associated to their contact, the form is pre-populated via the email recipient Id, not the cookie. Therefore they get the wrong person’s information on the form. This is only the case where you’re using the out of the box form pre-population that is based on clicking through from an email.
- The recipient id is generated at the time of the email batch being processed. So for every Email Asset and Email address that it’s sent to there is a unique recipient Id associated. These are stored on a back end table, but it’s not something that an end user/marketer would be able to use. For every email sent to a contact, they would receive a different recipient id.
2. PURL
- With respect to a PURL, if you visit the PURL page that was forwarded to you, my understanding is that you would see the person’s information who forwarded it to you, not your own. I would recommend testing this out just to be sure though. Eloqua handles the pre-population and whether the cookie takes priority or other factors based on the way you set it up though.
- Generally PURL pages do not have data lookup scripts on them because they are designed specifically for the reason of personalization for a specific person. They are targeted communications and if someone were to visit a page that another person was originally sent, for the most part they wouldn’t be alarmed that the other person’s information displayed – they were the intended recipient.
3. Data Lookup
- If they click through to a form that is doing pre-population based on a web data lookup script (thus referencing the cookie) then their correct information is displayed.
- If a person doesn’t have a cookie, a form is not pre-populated unless the link to the form was sent via email and is hosted on an Eloqua Landing page with pre-population configured. If someone visits a form page hosted elsewhere, and you have web data lookup scripts on it, they will not see any pre-population because we haven’t tied their cookie to their contact record yet.
- If a different contact types in a full PURL page url, they will see the information that belongs to the other person because we are doing the pre-population based on the PURL record associated with a specific contact.