The Marketo Winter release was rolled out last week. Although it has not been announced with a lot of noise, it still leaves an impression. Rarely have we seen as much activity on the Marketo Community, thanks to the “Munchkin V2” feature, announcing improved tracking performance as well as the removal of the capability to track anonymous lead’s activity in real time. What is the saga all about? Unless you prefer to go to the dedicated Marketo Community FAQ, read through the 12 discussion streams, 200 comments and 8 Marketo Documentation pieces, keep reading as we’ve pretty much wrapped it up in this post.
Removal of “Is anonymous” filter
Tracking anonymous leads on their journey to becoming known to the system is a key piece in the entire digital marketing measurement puzzle. Knowing who was touched by a campaign before they later convert is vital to measuring campaign influence and ultimately discriminating investments based on the attributed revenue to each of those vendors, channels and activities of yours. The “Is anonymous” smartlist filter has been removed – so it can’t be used any more. If an anonymous lead takes actions that should “normally” get them through a smart campaign, it will only do so at the moment of the lead promotion to “Known”, and it will execute the related action steps only if: 1. Campaign has a primary – direct anonymous lead web activity – as a trigger (Ex: subsequent data value changes or other secondary actions will not execute) 2. Activity occurred within the last 90 days (before pruned activities) 3. Activity type is one of:
- Change Score
- Interesting Moment
- Change Data Value
- Add to List
- Remove from List
4. This feature will be released in 2 phases
- Just released Feb 2-5th: UX updates and removal of smartlist filters in smartlists and reports
- Staggered release over several months: lead flows and new promoted leads processing.
Gains, gones and fallbacks
Gain: Not all is bad about that update. If you have a high volume website, you will gain the ability to track a larger volume of web events (up to 100 million per day) as well as general platform performance. Here are the kind of concerns that crossed our – and many other’s – mind and some ways to still dream of one piece digital marketing flow again: Gone: Anonymous lead activity triggered alerts. Some clients used to send alerts if certain anonymous leads within specific inferred companies had heavy web activity. Fallback: Build a web activity report, and create a report subscription for your sales staff. Gone: The ability to target anonymous leads through Ad Bridge. While it was possible (but not officially promoted) to build a smartlist using “Is anonymous” filter in Marketo Lead Management, this is no longer doable. Fallback: The Real Time Personalization Module still offers the ability to build anonymous leads audience, use it to personalize web content and advertising. (Ok, Calling RTP a fallback is clearly reductive, check out our previous post Creating a Personalized Experience for Anonymous Leads with Marketo to learn more about it. This progressive release buys us a bit of time to digest the different impacts that this will have. How will the backfilled Scoring impact MQL volumes? Will it generate false positives considering all scoring will happen at once without consideration of the scoring decays? Will this generate erroneous retroactive campaigns or cause breaks in flow for critical secondary campaigns? Stay tuned as this may disserve a follow-up post. In the meantime, don’t forget your homeworks: consult your “Notifications” for a list of campaigns and reports still using the “Is anonymous filter and:
- Remove the “Is anonymous” filter from any smart campaign – otherwise these campaigns will not run.
- Update reports where you need anonymous leads to show up. The “Is anonymous” filter has to be deleted and replaced by updating the report setup properties.
Create Programs Through API
With the REST API now allowing to create, update and clone programs, it opens the door for 3rd party applications and services to further integrate and control more pieces of the Marketo automation processes. Just a few months ago at our corporate meeting we came up with the crazy idea of a super admin system that could generate programs and campaigns on “auto-pilot” mode based on consultant flicking a few switches…Ok we’re not there yet but this makes the dream a bit less of a fantasy now.
Facebook Lead Ads Integration
In October 2015, Facebook announced new ads formats, including Facebook Lead Ads. These ads allow you to embed a custom form directly into a Facebook ad. The new Marketo integration will allow to capture leads directly from Facebook Lead Ads. It will:
- Automatically create/update lead records in Marketo from Ad form completion
- Allow mapping of Ad forms answers to lead fields
- Make “Fills our Facebook Lead Ads form” available as a trigger in smart campaigns
Here is how it works:
1. Login to your corporate Facebook account as an admin.
2. First you need a Facebook Lead Ad. Check out this Facebook tutorial to learn how to setup lead ads.
3. Then you need to configure Facebook as a web services under Admin\Integrations\Launchpoint Select New and New Service and create a Facebook Launchpoint Service.
4. Select the corresponding Facebook Pages where you will be running Lead Ads and complete field mapping. For a video walkthrough of this new feature, please check out this Marketo recorded webinar. Publish your Facebook Ad Campaign and get ready to receive new leads from Facebook!
Subscribe to our blog for our review of upcoming Marketo releases. Image Credits: Munchkin Cookie @AmritaMathur via Twitter
