TROUBLESHOOTING Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Workaround

Included in this article

  1. Overview
  2. Stopping Send Alerts for Anonymous leads
  3. Excluding Anonymous Leads entirely (use with caution)
  4. Deleting Lead Partitions

Revised 2/19/2016

Added caution on "Lead Was Created" work around

Added "Stopping Send Alerts" work around

Added "Deleting Lead Partitions" Known issue

Revised 2/17/2016

Marked "Lead Was Created" work around as under review

1. Overview

The upgrade to anonymous leads is a two—step process. The first part removes the “Is Anonymous” filter and performs all other changes to the Marketo UI as outlined in the Changes Inside Marketo UI documentation here. The second part is the introduction of Munchkin V2. This piece is where the new lead promotion behavior is introduced as outlined in the Munchkin V2 Behavior documentation here. The changes to the Marketo UI removes access to anonymous leads, but they do still exist inside Marketo until the Munchkin V2 piece rolls out later this year.

In the meantime between now and then, your smart campaigns will include these anonymous leads even though you won’t be able to access those leads. This can result in things like blank Send Alert emails going out for leads that can’t be accessed. This document will show you how to exclude those anonymous leads pending the Munchkin V2 release.

2. Stopping Send Alerts for Anonymous Leads

The biggest problem Support has seen so far is with blank Send Alert emails being sent for anonymous leads that can’t be accessed. There is a very isolated use case when this occurs. The Send Alert flow step sends the email to the Lead Owner or the Account owner, but anonymous leads can’t be synced to SFDC, so the only time anonymous leads could have an Alert email sent is if the flow step is set to send “To Other Emails”.

To stop anonymous leads from having the Alert email sent, add a choice to the flow step with the condition that if the Email Address is empty, do nothing. Since anonymous leads won’t have an email address, they will skip the flow step and the problem is resolved.

Send Alert Flow step work around.PNG

This solution will not require any changes after the Munchkin V2 roll out later this year. Since the campaign replay process on lead promotion does not execute Send Alert flow steps (described in Anonymous Lead Promotion to Known Lead – Munchkin V2 Behavior and Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Under The Hood), that replay process will not be affected.

caution email address required field.PNG

3. Excluding Anonymous Leads (use with caution)

When a lead becomes a known lead, a Lead Was Created activity is logged. If the lead is still anonymous, it will not have this activity in its activity log. Adding the “Lead Was Created” filter in your Smart Lists and Smart Campaigns will stop all anonymous leads from going through the campaign.

Caution Lead promotion breaks.PNG

Adding the filter

Lead Was Created Filter.PNG

Remove the Date of Activity constraint in the filter by clicking the X on the right side. This will make the filter look for the activity for all time.

Lead Was Created Filter NO DATE.PNG

With this filter added like this, all leads that qualify will be known leads, and all anonymous leads that still exist will be ruled out.

4. Deleting Lead Partitions

Until Munchkin V2 rolls out, anonymous leads still exist in the lead database even though they can’t be accessed. Lead partitions can’t be deleted if there are leads still in them and you’ll get this error:

Error deleting lead partition.PNG

If you receive this error, the first step is to make sure these aren’t known leads. To do this, navigate to Admin > Workspaces & Partitions > Lead Partitions and click the “Show # of Leads” button.

Lead partition show leads.PNG

This will open up the column where you can view how many known leads are in the partition. Any leads showing up here will be known leads.

Lead partition show leads 2.PNG

Use a “Lead Partition” filter in a smart list to identify these leads, then move the leads to a different partition.

Once this is done, if you have zero leads showing in the partition but still get the error saying you can’t delete the partition because it has leads, open a case with Marketo Support. The anonymous leads will need to be deleted on the back end by our Engineering team.