Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi all,

We have been receiving today an information from Cheryl Chavez​ about the removal of the is Anonymous filter, as part of the release of Munchkin v2. See here for more details : Next Generation Munchkin Tracking FAQ - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

Although this new version of the munchkin and the way the V2 will work is promising, there is one thing we will be missing, though: the ability to look at the anonymous leads, display inferred and origin informations and create an understanding of where they come from and how they arrived here.

Also, some database providers use anonymous leads to read their IP addresses and provide in return some leads from the same IP address for retargeting. They will be in hard difficulty.

Your thoughts ?

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Arjun Nair​ and Mike Reynolds​,

Another use case is : what about smart campaigns that use to run for anonymous leads only. Typically, some customers run smart campaigns to limit the behavior score so that it does not go over a limit for anonymous leads.

Would a "lead is created" trigger with a "behavior score" greater than limit work in this case ?

In other words, will the retroactive campaigns fire :

1. BEFORE the "lead is created" trigger ?
2. AFTER the "lead is created" trigger ?
3. or will they fire physically in a random, non manageable, order ?

More globally, can we expect that all the retroactive triggers will fire in exactly the same order as is they had been firing in real time ?

If I may, it seems to me that this needs to be clearly documented in the upcoming doc

-Greg

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Greg,

Speaking of documentation, I just got these published. I was trying to get them out at the start of the week, but here they are, hot off the (digital) press!

I'll post these down at the bottom of the thread also.

Anonymous Lead Upgrades Overview

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Changes Inside Marketo UI

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Customer Action Needed

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Analytics Reports

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Release Schedule

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Under The Hood

Anonymous Lead Promotion to Known Lead – Munchkin V2 Behavior

[Dan_Stevens_]

Greg - I don't think a "lead is created" trigger here will work since that only triggers for known leads.  And if you don't include the "is anonymous" filter in your smart list - like my examples above - Marketo won't even include them in the results.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

Yes, I am talking about the very second when the lead is created (becomes known) and all the passed triggers execute retroactively and at the same time the "lead is created" trigger fires as well.

If I used to have triggered for anonymous leads that ought to fire before the "lead is created", I may have some dependencies. For instance, let's say I have some behavior "visits web page" scoring that used to trigger for anonymous leads. And I also have a trigger for just created leads with a score > 20 (lead is created trigger + score > 20 filter).

In the future, when the leads becomes known, will the retroactive scoring triggers fire before the lead is created (in which case I may have some of my newly created leads with score >20) or not ? The order of execution is very important here.

-Greg

[hena_wells]

Before. All the campaign execution will happen before the "New Lead" activity is created.

Aj

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Thanks Arjun,

This is really key that we can count on this execution order to set the lead management/life cycle campaigns.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Thanks for clarifying.  I agree - the order of execution is definitely key here since you may have a bunch of trigger campaigns that activate all at once.  Where this could become an issue is when certain type of alerts or emails are also part of those trigger campaigns.  You could end up having these all trigger at once.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi All,

Arjun Nair​ is requesting some input on this idea :  

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

I have a very dim outlook on this change, I created a discussion (more of a rant) here before realizing you already made one: Removing the 'is Anonymous' filter - That's A TERRIBLE IDEA​

Does anyone have a suggestion, per the below rant, now that the 'is anonymous' filter is being removed.

I hope I'm not the only one saying this, but removing the 'is anonymous' filter is one of the most shortsighted and perhaps most 'bone-headed' moves you can make.  I feel a sales pitch about RTP about to happen, but more importantly you have essentially removed the reason we've bought into Marketo in the first place...  The ability to convey information to other tools in the LaunchPoint ecosystem to INTELLIGENTLY TARGET anonymous people  - is now gone.

I don't want to lose QUALITY -  TOP OF FUNNEL targeting.  The ability to HYPERTARGET unknowns who have made desirable actions on my site using ADBRIDGE will be lost, and my 'closed loop reporting' is fractured because I will need to action things from an outside system... Is this not Lead Gen (remarketing) 101???  How do I target these people now?

You have to realize, that you have essentially removed our ability to action anything on anonymous people, and that makes me very upset and angry because as a Non-Profit we have been stripped of a valuable capability ingrained available in the database and a large portion of our data is being held hostage.... SO, if 80% of my database is not being used, I would expect an 80% reduction in the cost of the tool.

Apologies for going into a rant about this, but this is a most TERRIBLE IDEA and I'm actually quite frustrated about this:

This alone is enough for me to recommend cancelling our Marketo accounts and move-on to another provider that gives us access to this group.  There is HUGE value in the unknown leads and Marketo may lose us over this.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nicholas,

Could you illustrate the use cases you are having with anonymous leads, how you use them ?

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Anonymous users who visit certain portions of our site or perform certain actions but do not convert into a lead or ecommerce conversion.  ex. target unknowns by specifying 'if anonymous', 'visited web page', (more conditions, if needed) - send through adbridge = hypertargeted

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Nicholas,

Can you clarify what exactly you're doing with these anonymous leads once you identify them? I understand you're targeting those anonymous records, but what are you doing with adbridge?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Another idea to vote for, in order to "compensate" for the loss of info is this one :

-Greg

[David_Desrosie2]

There is already a lot of limitations with Anonymous leads and I was hoping that Marketo would move forward to closing the gap with analytics and ad technologies that rely a lot on these leads to get closer to the "full picture". I find this disappointing.

Also I see a lot of cases where passing a lead retroactively in a smart campaign is a bad idea. A lot of what we do is time sensitive Ex: Interesting Moments, Scoring, Data Updates and should not be triggered if it's not immediately dealt with. My other concern is that the date stamps associated with campaign membership and potentially program status (if it's part of that campaign flow) will also be decayed vs their "real" time and will also skew reporting that relies on the membership or status update timing...

[Mike_Reynolds2]

David,

A couple of points in regards to the time stamp logging:

• All activity a lead had prior to becoming known will be logged chronologically in the new lead record with the correct corresponding date/time stamps once the lead becomes known.
• The campaigns that are triggered by the anonymous activity will be processed in order of the activities that occurred, oldest to newest.
• In the lead’s activity log, all campaign activities (with one exception below) will be logged with the time stamp of when the lead becomes known, right before the New Lead activity.
• Interesting Moment flow step activities will be backdated to the date and time when the corresponding anonymous activity occurred.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

This I strongly disagree with. Anonymous functionality should be binary - either fully functional or not at all functional. Having them be partially or retroactively functional greatly compromises the integrity of most trigger campaigns as they can start triggering off activities that occurred days or weeks ago. At that point, trigger campaigns are no longer trigger campaigns anymore, they're rogue batch campaigns.

If this isn't going to change, there should at least be an option to turn this functionality off in the admin panel.

EDIT: Looks like Grégoire Michel​ has already posted an idea about this:

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi David,

Fully agreed about time sensitiveness. Vote here :

-Greg

[Anonymous]

We rely on Is Anonymous in combination with Visits Web Page + Querystring to track clicks and subsequent behavior originating from Adwords, retargeting, and other online channels. Any suggestions for a workaround?

Tole

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Campaigns will still trigger off of the web activity like from the Visits Web Page, including with the Querystring constraint. The difference is that they will not be triggered until the lead becomes known. In this case, you'll just need to remove the Is Anonymous filter since all leads will be known at the time the campaigns are activated.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Another example of the anonymous leads will be the way the lead life cycle is set, starting with an "anonymous" status that exists only in Marketo and gets changed when the lead becomes known... Of course, this part of the cycle is not the most important one, yet, again, it's all about measuring conversion rates that disappears.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I also have customers who were using the "is anonymous" filter to get a measurement of the number of visits and compare with the new known leads generated in the same period from online forms, in order to measure their ability to attract and convert anonymous visitors.

Although this can surely be done with Google Analytics, it requires a separate application. It also convenient to have everything in the same place

-Greg