Marketo Engage Experience Makers Spotlight

And you know we needed to show you that spotlight just to drive the message home. So first up, we have a three-time Marketo champion and three-time Marketo certified expert, Natalie Kramer. Natalie Kramer is from McGraw-Hill, where she is a marketing automation manager, and she is here to shine a light, get it, on the power of the activity log. Welcome Natalie. Thank you so much. Welcome everyone to my session called Digging for Answers, Getting to Know the Marketo Activity Log. I’m Natalie Kramer. I’m the marketing automation manager at McGraw-Hill Higher Education. I oversee our Marketo instance and a lot of our tech integrations across our entire stack. I’ve been working in Marketo for just over six years, and I’m super excited. I’ve been a Marketo champion for the last three years, and I’m also a Marketo certified expert. So I hope there’s a lot that I can teach you today about the activity log. We’ll also be having live Q&A at the end of the session, so if you have any questions, put those right in the chat and we’ll answer those once we wrap up. So how many of your days look like this? How many of you get questions like this all day long? Why didn’t Bob Smith receive my email? Why did this person register for my webinar and they’re not in the Salesforce campaign? What web pages did this person visit before they requested a demo? You might not know how to find these answers easily, but they are there. So we’re going to talk today about how you can use the Marketo activity log to troubleshoot and get to these answers quickly. So let’s get in and start digging. All right, so let’s talk about how you find the Marketo activity log. So the activity log is going to be all of the information about a specific person within your Marketo database. So if you go to look at that, it’ll be activity from all of your email campaigns, visits to your web pages that have your Munchkin code embedded. It’ll be any of the smart campaigns that they’ve run through, any of the integration points they’ve met from your CRM, event integrations or others. Any activity that they take in your Marketo instance will be included here. So to find a specific person’s activity log, you can search for them in the Marketo database using their email address, or you can get to their lead record from any list view in Marketo. So static list, smart list, qualified people tabs, any place that you have like a person list, you can click through to the activity log. And then once you’re on their record, you just click here in the top right corner on the activity log tab and you’ll get started. So once you’re on the activity log, depending on how active someone is in your Marketo instance, it could be thousands and thousands of records. It can be a lot to dig through and you might not know where to start. So thankfully Marketo has given us these awesome out of the box tools to use to filter down. You can see here there is a filter menu that comes out of the box from Marketo that lets you filter down by specific types of activity. So if you only want to look for email or web activity, you can select those and what shows in your activity log will automatically filter down. If you only want to see smart campaigns or your CRM activity, you can select that and it will automatically filter that list. You can also create your own custom filter in the activity log, creating a variety of activities. So say you want to see the web page activity and the email activity, you can go ahead and create that custom view for yourself in the activity log. One of my favorite ways to search in the activity log is by the search bar at the bottom of the screen. You can go ahead and put in any value here and search for that within the activity log. So if you have really solid naming conventions or you have certain types of smart campaigns you’re looking for, you can enter that in the search bar and it will filter your list just for those. And then finally you can use the export feature to go ahead and export your whole activity log, thousands of records to Excel and use more advanced filtering there to get to what you’re looking for. So now we’re going to dig a little bit into the individual activities within the activity log. So here you can see we’re going to be looking at the opened email activity. Within the activity details window itself, you’re going to see we redacted some of the information for PII reasons, but you can see specific values depending on that activity type. So here you can see what type of device they opened it on, the platform they were using, and then some other details about that actual opened email activity. Next we’re going to dig into the email bounce soft activity. So you have a couple of different bounce activity filter types here, but for this one you can really drill in and see what type of device they were using, when they were sent the email, all of those things about why it was a bounced email. All right, so now we’re going to look at the fill out form activity within the activity log. So if you click into that activity detail pane, you’re going to see some different types of things that are tied to that activity. The most important thing here is going to be your form field section. So looking at that, you’re going to see all of your submitted values from the form, everything that your customer put in and then submitted. You’re also going to see any hidden fields. So if you use hidden form fields for tracking or for UTMs, you’ll see all of those there all of those here too, as well as the hidden values that were in those fields. So if you had any errors, you can look here to troubleshoot and then go back into your program and fix what those hidden values should be. You’re also going to see your web referrer and your web ID. So you can go ahead and see where that form lives and then also troubleshoot that way. And one other thing that’s super helpful is that the program name where that form lives is located here within the activity details. So you can go ahead and look at that if you need to go in and make any tweaks to the form. So now that we’ve talked about some of the activities within the activity log, we’re going to talk about how to troubleshoot with those activities. I always like to start by thinking about every action or any activity that happens in your Marketo instance, you would expect a certain set of actions to happen afterwards. So when you have an issue or someone comes to you with one of those questions from the beginning of our talk, you’re going to think about what should have happened if this activity should have happened, what would we look for in the activity log? We’d look for that email delivered or that fill out form and then we work backwards to figure out why it didn’t happen and discover what the issue is. So let’s look at some specific examples here. So we broke this out. We’ll go back to our email troubleshooting topic and broke it out into two columns here. So the expected behavior, what you would think would happen normally when someone does these activities and then what we should look for in case something didn’t happen. So onto our expected behavior, you know, for emails, we’re looking for those email sent, email delivered, we’re looking for email opened and then clicked if there was engagement there. So what if one of those things didn’t happen? How do we figure out what went wrong? So some things to look for are those bounced emails like we looked at earlier in our example. It could be a hard or soft bounce, but you can investigate why that happened, if it was a temporary issue or something that might be recurring and kind of dig in to see if it’s related to the person or maybe it’s related to that company and figure out what’s at play. One of the things that could happen and often happens with emails not being delivered is people’s communication limits were hit. This can be hard to see from your email performance reports, but this is flagged as an activity within the activity log. So you can see when that happened, what emails they received before and when their communication limits are set to reset. And then finally, this is a gotcha that happens to my own record all of the time. The marketable status. Has this person become email suspended or maybe they’ve unsubscribed and that’s why they’re not receiving the email. This is one of the first things I look for when troubleshooting email issues to see if there’s operational programs running or something else that’s happened to make them not marketable. So we’re going to shift back to our form troubleshooting issues now. There’s things that you would expect to happen with your form fills. The form would be submitted, any trigger campaigns would run, any of your system updates would occur, or any emails or alerts were sent as follow up or as internal routing. So when one of those things doesn’t work, what are you going to look for in the activity log? One of the first things to look at is for that missing form submission. Did the form actually submit? Is there an issue with the web page it’s on or landing page? Is the trigger criteria not met? Another gotcha is, is your trigger campaign turned on? Maybe you forgot to turn it on. So looking into those trigger campaigns to make sure that you don’t have specific criteria in there that this person doesn’t meet. You know, oftentimes we’ll layer on certain types of marketable status if we’re sending emails or look at other things within their record. So make sure that this person actually meets that criteria. If you’re making system updates, make sure that your field updates are allowed from a form fill out. You know, a lot of times in field management, we kind of set it and forget it, but make sure if you are trying to push updates to certain fields that it’s allowed within your Mercado instance. And then finally, again, we’re going to revisit the communication limits. If there is supposed to be a confirmation email sent, is this person within their communication limits or have they hit them and that’s why they didn’t receive the email? So there’s a lot to think about when you’re troubleshooting forms, but these are just some of the areas to get started with as you’re investigating. So what do you do once you uncover an issue? We’ve talked through all the ways that you can identify your issues, but how do you fix that once you’ve found those issues in the activity logs? Mercado released an awesome feature last year that actually lets you run person actions right from the activity log. So you no longer need to go back to marketing activities or to your programs to make those corrections. So we’re going to walk through some of those things here and how you can make those updates right from the activity log. So first off, we’re going to look at the marketing options within the person actions. How many times have you had an email address in your system that has a typo in it? Maybe it’s missing the M at the end of .com. These things happen all of the time with human error. So maybe you’re looking to see why that person didn’t receive your email address. So you’ve corrected that email address on your record and you need to resend the email. Using the person actions is the perfect opportunity to do this. You can also do things like add people to lists, remove them from lists, and also update or use the change data value to make updates to their record. There’s a wealth of opportunities here. The next section is the program section. So this will be really important to those of you who use engagement programs heavily. Maybe the issue you had was that it didn’t change the engagement program stream or the cadence that someone had. You can make those corrections right from the activity log as well. The next area is the special section. So this is kind of a lot of miscellaneous activities that you can use to make updates to your programs. So a lot of times it’s related to the actual campaign itself. You can request campaigns or execute campaigns from here as well as remove people from your flow steps. Finally, the last section is related to your CRM, which in my case is Salesforce. This is a great opportunity to use if you have updates that you need to make with your Salesforce campaigns. So if you push your program members and statuses into the corresponding Salesforce campaigns, this could be a really good opportunity to make changes that would maybe error it out in your flow or didn’t happen within the program. So we’ve covered a lot of ground today. We’re going to run through our takeaways for the session and just things that you can look for as you start investigating your own activity logs. So let’s revisit what we talked about today. We talked about how you can get to the person’s activity log from all different kinds of places in Marketo to make it really easy to start troubleshooting. We talked about how you can filter within the activity log, how you can use custom filters and the out of the box filters to narrow down all of those thousands of activities within a person’s record. We talked about how you can dig into those individual activity types so you can really start investigating why things broke down and why there were issues within your Marketo programs. We talked about what to look for when you’re troubleshooting. So there’s different things that can happen and different things that can fail. And we identified some of those key areas that you can use as you start troubleshooting on your own. And finally, we talked about how the person actions right there in the activity log can really help you make corrections on the spot. So there’s a lot to learn with the activity log and the only way to do it is to dig in and start practicing. So I encourage you the next time you get one of those questions, use it as an opportunity to put on your detective hat and get in there and start digging. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I’m excited to answer your questions here soon. Thank you, Natalie. The activity log is an important feature and I think not enough people probably take advantage of it to the extent that they should and could. So I hope everyone takes advantage of that and learns from Natalie’s presentation or spotlight. If you have any questions for Natalie, please drop them into the chat now and we’re going to go through that live later. But before we do Q&A, I want to introduce you to our second experience maker, Keith Nyberg. Now Keith is here on his spotlight to walk you through executable campaigns, which is an awesome feature that customers love. We rolled this out last May, May of 2021, and we think it’s going to raise your game in a big way. Remember Keith will join Natalie and myself for Q&A following this presentation. So again, drop any questions either for Natalie or for Keith that you have into the chat. And if you just thought of something to ask Natalie, drop in that too and we’ll get into the next spotlight. Again, here’s Keith on executable campaigns. Welcome Keith. Thank you so much. I’m really excited to share with everybody how we can better understand executable smart campaigns today. As mentioned, my name is Keith Nyberg and I’m currently a senior marketing operations consultant at Atumos. I’m also the co-leader of the San Diego Marketo Engage user group. I’m a Marketo certified solutions architect, and I have been a four-time Marketo champion in the past. Outside of work, some of my hobbies include surfing and golfing, taking walks with my wife Lauren and our poodle Ollie around the neighborhood, and also organizing my 120 person Burning Man camp. Jumping into some of the content that we’re going to be covering today, we’re first going to be talking about the difference between requested and executable smart campaigns. To do that, we’re going to cover what is a requested smart campaign, because maybe not everybody knows. After we discuss what a requested smart campaign is, we’re then going to talk about what an executable smart campaign is. Once we’ve talked about both of those things, we’ll talk about how a requested and executable smart campaigns are different. We’ll then talk about how to decide which type of smart campaign to use based on your use case. We’ll show you some other considerations and limitations to keep in mind when using executable smart campaigns. I will show you how you can create an executable smart campaign yourself. And finally, we’ll talk about best practices for repeatable data management using executable smart campaigns. And I’ll give you an example where you can help consolidate in your instance the usage of your person is created trigger using executable smart campaigns. So let’s jump into the content and talk about requested versus executable smart campaigns. What is a requested smart campaign? A requested smart campaign is a smart campaign that is initiated or triggered by another Marketo smart campaign’s flow action. In the screenshots you’ll see below, we have smart campaign A, and in the flow action of that campaign, we are requesting smart campaign B. On the right hand side, you can see a trigger for campaign is requested that lives in smart campaign B, and this will help initiate that campaign when requested from smart campaign A. An example use case for a requested campaign would be if you manage a lifecycle program, and when a record is processed into the nurture stage, you need to ensure that behavior score is reset. As behavior score is typically managed by your scoring program, you can request the OPscoring.ResetBehaviorScore campaign in the flow actions of the smart campaign managing your disqualified process. So again, we’re really going to initiate smart campaign B from smart campaign A. Some of the benefits of using a requested campaign are that it allows you to centralize the management of a specific field in a single program. Also, the campaign is requested trigger can be used in addition to other standard triggers in your instance. Let’s pretend that you have a smart campaign that’s triggered on a data value change, and it’s also potentially triggered on a campaign is requested. Even if the data value change didn’t occur, you could still initiate that smart campaign from somewhere else in your instance at your preferred time, even though the data value change didn’t occur. So now that we’ve talked about the requested smart campaigns, let’s talk about what is an executable smart campaign. An executable smart campaign is a smart campaign that is initiated or triggered by another Marketo smart campaign’s flow actions. In the screenshot below, you’re going to see that smart campaign A has a flow action that is going to execute smart campaign B. Now, if you were paying attention in the previous slide, you’ll start to feel like Fry here, and you’re going to be questioning me saying, Keith, isn’t that the exact same definition as a requested smart campaign? And the answer is yes, but they are different, and we’re going to dig into how they differ right now. So how requested and executable smart campaigns different? The first reason that executable smart campaigns are different than requested smart campaigns is process completion. The request campaign flow action will simply initiate the secondary smart campaign to run and then proceed through the remainder of the initial smart campaigns flow actions, where an executable campaign flow action will ensure the executed smart campaign completes its flow actions fully before proceeding through the remainder of the initiating smart campaigns flow actions. Now, I’m no dummy, and I totally understand that this definition is very dense and probably really hard to understand. So to better articulate this definition, which we’ll circle back to, I’d like to provide an example using some simple flows in Marketo. So on the left-hand side here, you can see an example where Smart Campaign A is going to add members to a static list. It is going to request Smart Campaign B, and then in flow action number three, we are going to evaluate a smart list to determine whether we need to run a change data value. On the right-hand side, we’re going to do the exact same thing for flow actions one and three, but rather than requesting a campaign in flow action step number two, we are going to execute the campaign in flow action number two. Now while both of these look identical in the flow actions, they really are different, and to articulate that difference, we can really do that with a flow chart. On the left-hand side here, you’re going to see just as discussed, we have Smart Campaign A, which adds members to static list A, and then requests campaign B, which initiates campaign B to begin, but while it’s also initiating campaign B, it is then proceeding down to flow action number three, which is the evaluation of the smart list to determine the change data value. On the right-hand side, the executable Smart Campaign is doing almost a similar process, right? Smart Campaign A is adding records to static list A, it is then going to execute Smart Campaign B, and it is going to trigger Smart Campaign B and make sure that that campaign has completed fully before coming back to flow step number three, where the evaluation for list membership occurs to determine the change data value. So while these look very similar, really the example on the left is an example of asynchronous processing, which means that Smart Campaign B is running at the exact same time as flow action number three is running in Smart Campaign A, where the executable Smart Campaign example on the right is synchronous processing, meaning we will know reliably that Smart Campaign B has concluded fully before Smart Campaign A will proceed to the next flow action, which is the evaluation based on smart list. I understand that these visuals are a little bit dense and might be hard to understand. If you have any questions specific to this example, please throw them in the chat right now. It would be my pleasure to address any that you have. So coming back to the definition that I shared earlier of process completion for executable campaigns, I’m going to read it again, and I’m hopeful now that this will make a little bit more sense. The request campaign flow action will simply initiate a secondary Smart Campaign to run and then proceed through the remainder of the initial Smart Campaign’s flow actions, where the execute campaign flow action will ensure the executed Smart Campaign completes its flows fully before proceeding through the remainder of the initiating Smart Campaign’s flow actions. Now what this means at a high level summary is that executable campaigns give us the ability to control timing and enable synchronous processing in our instance, being able to control the order of operations and where they occurred relative to each other in a linear path. Some examples of timing dependencies that you may have in your instance include country being standardized before evaluating for compliance, whether we need to up somebody in or out based on where they’re located, right? We’d want to make sure we have a country first. Other examples include country being standardized before setting a marketing region, running enrichment before appending empty fields from enrichment data, ensuring lead source capture processes have completed before an initial sync to SFDC, or potentially attempting to normalize industry before knowing the value to ensure that we can actually sync a record to SFDC if that field has restricted picklist values. Outside of process completion though, there is another primary benefit to executable Smart Campaigns in their usage in Marketo, and that benefit is inherited token values. The executable campaign flow action will enable you to decide if you would like to override token values to use values from the initiating campaign. This enables you to choose whether you want to use the initiating Smart Campaigns tokens or the other executable campaigns tokens that live local to that Smart Campaign. Now while that may not make sense, I’m going to jump into another example because that’s something that I think is always helpful. Again, let’s pretend that your company wants to centralize alerts to the sales team when contact is requested. Your company has tons of different programs that track contact us requests occurring on different pages. You could in theory create a single OP alerts program and have an executable Smart Campaign with a send alert in the flow action. This Smart Campaign could then be executed from the contact us program Smart Campaigns that are all local to those programs with use parent campaign contact set to true, which is a little feature that’s flagged on the executable Smart Campaign, and that would allow us to include details in the alert that are specific to the other program that is initiating this alert to send. Again, a high level summary of what this functionality is, is that it really allows you to use Smart Campaigns A tokens in an email sent from Smart Campaign B or in any of the other flow actions local to Smart Campaign B. Now that we’ve talked about the benefits of using executable Smart Campaigns, let’s talk about when we need to use them, right, and how we decide whether we want to use an executable Smart Campaign versus a requested Smart Campaign. And this really comes back to the benefits that we just discussed on our previous slides. Again, executable Smart Campaigns should be used when a process is timing dependent or when the process requires token inheritance. And if neither of these things are required, we should probably simply just use a requested campaign instead of an executable campaign. Now while executable Smart Campaigns are fantastic, and we saw the benefits of controlling timing and token inheritance, there are some considerations for use of executable Smart Campaigns in your instance, which I want to run through with you right now. The first consideration is that you cannot add additional triggers to an execute Smart Campaign, only filters. You’ll remember that when we talked about the requested campaign, you can layer on other triggers in addition to that campaign is requested trigger. Executable Smart Campaigns don’t allow you to have any triggers on the campaign. You really need to only execute that campaign from other places in your instance. Another important consideration is that there are certain flow actions that cannot be used with executable Smart Campaigns. And those flow actions are the wait and the webhook flow actions. Again, my assumption is that because some of these things are a little bit more labor intensive on the system, we may not want to use them in an executable Smart Campaign because we need to ensure that they’ve completed. But either way, regardless of what I assume, neither of these are available in the flow actions of an executable Smart Campaign. Another consideration is that executable Smart Campaigns are always active in the instance and will always show as they are turned on. This means that you cannot switch on or off or change the type of the campaign like a triggered or batch campaign in a Marketo. So in terms of field usage, it’s going to look like these fields are always in use, even though you’re not executing the campaign from other places in your instance, it still will look like it is on. Another consideration is that executable Smart Campaigns can only be called up to three levels deep. So if we think about our ability to control the linear processing, this consideration is very critical because we can only ever go three levels deep. And if we try to go any further than that, Marketo will not be able to reliably complete that process before the parent initiating campaign completes. Another consideration is that existing Smart Campaigns cannot be converted into executable Smart Campaigns. They must be created as executable Smart Campaigns from the get go. Marketo is smart enough actually to know that you can’t do this. And so if you ever try to do it, it’s just going to throw an error and tell you like, hey, you know, you can’t create this, remove the triggers first before you can create your campaign. Another consideration is that executable Smart Campaigns are limited to a single workspace. So programs using executable Smart Campaigns cannot be cloned across workspaces, nor cloned and moved via a folder across workspaces. And finally, existing Smart Campaigns with triggers cannot be cloned into executable Smart Campaigns. This is kind of a repeat of the last of the second to last topic that I just mentioned. But again, we can’t really clone any existing Smart Campaigns. And again, an error will show in Marketo that says you need to remove the triggers first before we can actually create that campaign. So jumping into how we can create an executable campaign in Marketo, just like creating any other Smart Campaign in the left hand tree in marketing activities, you can right click and create a new Smart Campaign. And at the very bottom of this little dialog box that you’ll receive, you’ll see a little executable checkbox. When you check that box and hit create, you’ll notice that the type kind of lights up like a light bulb. And that means that you have successfully created an executable Smart Campaign. If you forget to check this box, you’re just gonna have a standard Smart Campaign. And you’re gonna have to delete it and recreate it if you really want it to be an executable Smart Campaign, which is a little bit annoying, but something that you have to do. So now that we’ve talked about requested and executable Smart Campaigns, the benefits and all that good stuff, let’s jump into a couple of real examples of where I like to use executable Smart Campaigns for data management in an instance. The first example you can see here is where we’re going to set region, right? On the left hand side, you see that we have a single executable Smart Campaign. In the Smart List, there was no criteria. And on the flow side, we’re going to use Smart List to evaluate what region to set using country values. Now you’ll notice in the program on the left in the tree, I have two other Smart Campaigns that live local to this data standardization. I first have a batch campaign that I could use to potentially initiate that executable campaign at a regularly occurring cadence. Or I have the ability to set up an additional trigger campaign that listens for real time actions to occur that then will execute the executable Smart Campaign up at the top. Again, this is just my preferred approach of how to manage executable campaigns in the instance. This is an example of a single level deep executable campaign, meaning there’s only one execute campaign that we’re going to run for this example. An example where you may want to go two levels deep would be something like country standardization. For those of you that are aware, the flow actions in Marketo for choices are limited and they’re not limited really, but the UI really starts to slow down if you add more than like 25 or 30 choices in any flow action. So to get around this for country standardization, it’s typically my preference to have a standardized country router at the very top, which you can see on the left hand side highlighted. That router is then going to use Smart List to evaluate what secondary executable campaign it wants to execute. And again, because these are executable, we’ll know that the router will run and then we’re going to standardize whatever the country is and that that process will complete in full when we need it to. The primary best use case for executable campaigns in the instance, and the reason why most marketing ops professionals got excited about this when this functionality came out earlier this past year in 2021, is that it really gives us the ability to consolidate the person is created triggers in your instance using executable campaigns. A lot of marketers really want to centralize the usage of the trigger that you’re seeing here on this slide, which is person is created. We at Atumos call this original processing. Some people call this managing lead creation processes. But in this example, I’m going to have a smart campaign that is triggered by this person is created trigger. This is the only place in the instance where we’re going to use this trigger. And from there in the flow step, I’m then going to request each of the other sub process that I want to run. And I’m not using an executable campaign here because I don’t want to waste my ability to go three levels deep. I’m just going to daisy chain between each of these campaigns moving forward. So the 000 campaign requests the 010, 010 requests 020, 020 requests 030 and creates a linear process. But local to these campaigns and data standardization using the examples we talked about earlier for executable campaigns, you’re going to notice that when a person is created after the lead source processes run, I am then going to execute some data standardization. The first thing that I want to execute is making sure that I have standardized my country values. And that was the two level deep example where I’m going to request execute the router first, the router will then execute the sub process. And once both of those processes complete, I know for a fact that my country standardization has occurred before I proceed down to the next executable campaign, which is going to set my region using that country value. So again, we talk about the value of executable campaigns and their usage. It really gives us the ability to control timing, reduce the redundancy of tasks running in our activity log, and ensure that process A has completed before we need to run a secondary process that is dependent on that data shown. I want to thank everybody for their time today and do a quick summary of the content that we covered today. We talked about the difference between requested and executable smart campaigns. We started with what is a requested smart campaign. We then talked about what is an executable smart campaign. We talked about requested and executable smart campaigns and how they differ, meaning the time dependencies of executable smart campaigns and the token inheritance of executable smart campaigns. We talked about how you can decide which smart campaign to use based on your use case. We talked about other considerations and limitations of executable smart campaigns. I showed you how to create an executable smart campaign yourself. And finally, I showed you a couple examples for best practices of repeatable data management using executable campaigns and how you can consolidate person-is-created triggers in your instance using executable smart campaigns. I want to thank everybody so much for listening in to my presentation. I’m really excited to answer any questions that you have in the live chat.

All right. We are back. Thank you so much, Natalie and Keith, for your great spotlight presentations. Now we’re going to do live Q&A and answer all of your questions, folks. So the first question is for Natalie, and this is from Chelsea. And Chelsea says, this is so helpful. I don’t think I’ve seen a presentation dedicated solely to the activity log. Now here’s a question. When do you suggest creating a smart list versus the activity log for troubleshooting? Smart list versus activity log. Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I always start with the activity log because a lot of times it’ll be like that one person someone brings up, this one person didn’t get my email. This one person had an issue. And you’re going to be able to tell from what you see in the activity log pretty quickly if it’s an isolated issue or something you need to dig into further. So I would start there, see what it looks like. And then if you think it might be a broader issue, go back, create some smart list and see just how broad that issue is. Great. Thank you. Here’s another one for you, Natalie, from Veronica. Do the person actions show up on the activity log when used? Yes, they do. This is a good question. I never really thought about it before. But yeah, they will show up as single flow actions within the activity log. So you can make sure after you run that person action that it’s successful, that you didn’t have any other issues. I’m going to make sure everything executed there. Great. Thank you. And now a question for you, Keith. How do you teach this to clients, especially those who are novices at building campaigns in MarketoEngage? This is definitely an expert level thing, executable campaigns. But the payoff seems really great. I know, Keith, you’ve done a lot to convert things to or you are still converting things to executable campaigns. Yeah, definitely. I think first off, identifying places in your instance where you’re already using requested campaigns is a really great initial starting point. Requested campaigns aren’t time sensitive, but there’s no harm in having them become time sensitive. So I would at least start by looking at what you’re requesting today and maybe convert those. And then separate from that, I always try to think of what processes are we repeating, right? And normally fields are going to live in a program that manages that field. But what parts of that program are you consistently rebuilding kind of the same things? And those are typically really great candidates for executable campaigns as well because you can centralize all that process into one place. You know, thinking about that, Keith, what’s the best way to identify processes that are good candidates for executable or requested smart campaigns? Yeah, I think it’s exactly kind of like what I just alluded to, right? Anytime we’re rebuilding consistent flow actions that are the same or anytime we’re managing processes and multiple smart campaigns that are identical, we’re really recreating the wheel every time versus just creating one throughput process that we can request or execute from other places. So again, I think it’s really important for us to find those redundancies in our build and to start to consolidate them into campaigns that we can manage more effectively.

Great, thank you. This is a question for Natalie. How long is activity data stored, right? So activity log, it doesn’t store the data forever. There’s some purging that goes on. How long is it stored? Do you know? You know, it varies on the activity type and there’s a lot of different rules around it. There’s a great article on the community that actually breaks down the storage policy for all the different activities. You stopped me there, kind of. There’s a lot of different details there. Keith, I don’t know, do you have specific ones that you’d call out? Yeah, I would just say a default rule in Marketo, almost all activities are going to be retained for 25 months is the standard kind of retention period. There are some high transaction activities like change data values and form fillouts and whatnot that may be on a 90 day cycle. So again, 25 months is a good default. And then there are some activities that are high traffic, like webpage activity that is lost after 90 days. Yeah, and I think when we make design decisions in the product engineering, we look at what kind of volume you’re going to get for a specific activity type to determine how long you’re going to keep it. And also what the business use cases are, just a product perspective. Keith, here’s another one for you. How do you teach, sorry, no, not that one. I already read that one. Let’s see. Oh, here’s a question, sorry, for Natalie. So you already answered one question about troubleshooting, you know, smart list versus activity log. You usually start with activity log, but I guess when somebody comes to you with a particular issue, what’s the first thing you do to investigate? Walk us through your procedure. Yeah, definitely. I think sometimes I have a hunch, right, when someone comes to me with an issue on what maybe happened, you know, whether it’s form fill out errors or, you know, emails that didn’t get sent, you know, there’s some automatic places where my mind goes. I actually have some really helpful list views. I didn’t cover that in the session, but you know how you can have your custom view when you’re looking at any marketo list. That can be a really helpful way to troubleshoot at a high level. So if someone’s not marketable, why aren’t they marketable? You know, what criteria are they meeting? And then if there’s nothing that stands out there, I drill into the activity log to see, you know, do they qualify for the smart campaign? Were they not in the audience to begin with? And kind of start at the higher level and then get down into the nitty gritty. You know, if they didn’t get it, if there’s no record in the activity log, is it a duplicate record? You know, is there something else happening there? So I think you kind of take it level by level. Like there’s the things that like always stick out as a starting point and then you can kind of keep drilling deeper. And there’s usually an answer there somewhere. Great, great. Good steps there to follow. Let’s see, from Veronica. Hey, Keith, thanks for your presentation. Nice comment there. Question is, what are some of your favorite use cases for executable campaigns? So you already told us a little bit about how you determine whether a process makes sense for executable campaigns. What are some specific use cases that you like for executable campaigns? Yeah. I always like to think about what processes need to occur that are time sensitive to others, right? And so, for example, if you want to manage a region aggregate field, right, and you have country before, which is an example I shared, that’s one of my favorite use cases. I mentioned original processing and all kind of the linear order of operations that we want to manage in terms of ensuring every critical program happens on person creation. That’s another really great use case for executable campaigns and all the subcomponents of those programs that you’re requesting, right? So you can kind of have a parent program that’s going to go ahead and execute all of those other time dependencies. I also think that there’s some really incredible value in the inherited token components, meaning you can start to centralize things like send alerts, you can start to centralize things like task creation, or even interesting moments with the ability to use inherited tokens in executable campaigns. And those are all things that weren’t typically available to us prior because we really had to manage all of the unique triggers in that program versus being able to inherit them from other programs themselves. So I think that the use cases are really yet to be defined and I think the industry is just starting to wrap their heads around the power that this is going to provide. And we’re all starting to build and accommodate with what we have as ideas, but sky’s the limit. Great, thank you. And here’s another question for you, Keith. Are executable campaigns the best way to consolidate the original processing in case leads are created from the CRM and MarketoEngage? And if we have a lifecycle model and lead scoring running as well. Yeah, I would say it is. And I’ve seen a lot of different clients of mine in instances where people will start to bifurcate and say, well, we’re going to have one entry point for people created from here and we’re going to have one entry point for people created from here. And I actually really don’t like that approach personally. I think that there really should be one consistent entry point for all records into your system and you can conditionally choose to action some of those sub processes for records based on how they’re created. But yes, I would argue every essential program that you want to ensure is running on creation, any data that is really relevant to run on creation, all of that should be centralized in the original processing type program. Great. So I’m just going to ask one last thing and then we’re going to close Q&A for this session. Natalie, you know, there are a lot of people who really haven’t thought about using activity logs. So what tip would you give them in terms of where to start to learn to use that? Yeah, definitely. I think just getting in there and starting to dig around. Right. I kind of hinted to it in the presentation, like the more exposure you get to it, the better you’ll get at figuring out what the issues are. So I think even if you just make yourself more comfortable, like go in there, if something comes up, if you want to analyze specific person’s activities, get in there, click around, see what’s there. You’re definitely not going to know how to do it on day one, but it’s something that you learn and kind of get better at over time. So I think just give yourself the opportunities to play around and you’ll be surprised what you can pick up. Great. Thank you so much, both to you, Natalie, and to you, Keith, for spotlighting two of our unsung heroes of MarketoEngage, ActivityLog and the newer executable campaigns. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.