Quick Tips Doc
You’ve landed here for quick tips on Marketo. Look for “| Deep dive” for tips that have a companion article.
Create trigger events to expand your use of Champion/Challenger A/B testing. You don’t need to wait for a natural trigger event. Couple your batch campaign with a trigger campaign using the champion/challenger feature.
Get your naming convention refined. Elements I think almost every program naming convention should feature, at a minimum: Program ID, Topic Area, Short Description. A good naming convention can really open up the scalability of your processes.
Make use of program tags. In addition to the channel tags (which you absolutely must use), you should also use additional program tags to help with your reporting efforts. Proper tagging can really help you refine your reports and make them easier to understand.
Use tokens to quickly locate assets that are flagged for updates with little information on where they originated. | Deep dive
Use custom columns to ramp up your reports. Custom columns are based on smart lists you create. They can add more nuance to your reports.
Date stamp. Date stamp this, and date stamp that. Date stamping truly important events helps tremendously when you’re trying to piece together a sequence of events, do historical reporting, etc. This is especially true with the time limits on certain events being kept in the activity log. | Deep dive - coming soon
Segmentation and custom object data. Do we love this? No. But if you MUST use custom object data in a segmentation (hopefully for only a brief time) you can create a program to populate static lists based on the CDO values that can then be used in segmentations. Use this if your back is against the wall, or for something you consider very temporary.
Ctrl+F! Did you know that your browser’s find feature totally works for finding values in super long multi-value entries in your smart list filters? Looking for a specific email address in a filter that contains 600 of them? No sweat. Ctrl+F. - Note I work almost exclusively in Google Chrome.
Ever heard of a helper field? You can create string fields to help make your life as an admin a little bit easier. They can help with your activity logs, complex processes, and more. | Deep dive
Trying to drop a token inside a url? You can tokenize urls, just make sure you format it properly so your click tracking doesn’t get nerfed. This means not adding the “http(s)://” within your token. Doing that will break your click tracking.
Velocity scripting is a fantastic tool to help with advanced personalization without the use of segmentations, advanced data formatting, and much more. Many of us (myself included) are guilty of not knowing it well enough. Start learning it!
Use the “Not…” filters in smart lists to help narrow down your time frames as needed. This can be especially helpful for smart campaigns that need to cover specific groups of people in a specific (yet relative) time frame. | Deep dive - coming soon
Test everything, including your own ideas. Remember that it’s ok to test and implement ideas that don’t work out. This is how we learn.
Please. Do us all a favor. Use the description fields in your smart campaigns! Those handy little fields are just waiting to be filled up with information that will help folks understand the who what and why of it. We really need to get better at this.
If you don’t document it, did it really happen? Yes, we know it did in fact happen, but what about X years from now when someone else is doing your job? Document!
