You're missing out by directly linking to PDFs
With a PDF Viewer and some adjustments to Munchkin,
you can leverage each viewed PDF page in your scoring and/or other logic within Marketo.
Why you shouldn't directly link to PDFs
One of the most used marketing automation capabilities is to engage people with content. These can be gated or ungated downloads on the corporate website, it can be in mailings, in sales emails, and/or nurture emails. A company would promote a video or whitepaper or blogpost for example. Another important capability is to use lead scoring to determine a person’s interest in purchasing your products or services. Is the person an MQL and should sales follow up on this person? Next to demographics and firmographics we would look at behavior. How much more effort or significance the engagement, the higher the scoring. Here’s the catch. There’s a lot that can be measured out of the box (e.g. email opens, email clicks, page views, form fills, event registrations, etc.). But it usually only tells you that a person opened it, but it doesn’t tell you if he/she actually consumed that content in a certain way.
We use TwentyThree for videos in our own Video Marketing. Instead of only detecting (and scoring) a click to a video, we can actually see how much of the video was seen, which parts, percentages, seconds, etc. And we can use in-video forms, etc.
Another thing, which we recently wrote a blog about, is the ‘Munchkin Event Tracking Page Weight’. Instead of just capturing a page view in Marketo, we can actually put a weighting to it. A combination of page size and time on page.
How to do it right?
So we covered blog posts and videos, but what about files, like whitepapers (PDF)? That’s why you should use a PDF viewer. Instead of pointing directly to a PDF file in emails, we point to a page that loads the PDF file in the browser. A script then also tracks and records each PDF page viewed longer than 3 seconds as a page view in Marketo. This will allow us to use the more in-depth engagement data on content to further improve lead scoring, interest scoring, success on content programs, contextual data for sales, etc.
For the PDF viewer, we’re leveraging Adobe Document cloud and it’s free SDK (Software Development Kit). The basic version is free. Anyone with a free Adobe account can create credentials for a private key. A paid version of Adobe Document Cloud would provide more analytics etc.
Note: If you’re a Chapman Bright customer, leveraging our Nurture & Scoring service or our Marketo Best-Practices service, you’re entitled to this technology. Please contact your account manager, if you think you’re not yet leveraging our PDF Viewer processes.