Re: Are there any Cvent + Marketo users here?

Ayan_Talukder · ‎10-06-2016

We onboarded Cvent this summer, great tool and had all of the features we wanted. However we started to notice a few issues with the data from Cvent syncing to Marketo. We set up everything as instructed and was told everything looked fantastic. After two events we just hosted, we noticed the data was not always making it through to Marketo from Cvent. It got so bad, that only 50% of the people attended our most recent event ended up with their status changed in Marketo.

We had to manually update the rest, but it's been a real pain. I just wanted to reach out to the community and see if there are any other Marketo + Cvent users here?

I have to be honest, the Cvent integration with Marketo is pretty out-dated. They rely on a Campaign is Requested trigger and look to see if the Source is Web Service API. I am concerned Marketo is unable to handle the calls coming from Cvent and is missing them.

Ayan_Talukder · ‎04-10-2018

Just to provide an update from 2 years ago, Cvent has been working much better now. They have finally integrated REST API along with having SOAP API making campaign calls. We have seen far less issues with the lead data transferring over to Marketo, but have encountered some newer issues such as:

Cvent requiring the same field type (e.g. string, integer, boolean, etc.) when mapping the Cvent fields with Marketo fields. The only resolution for this was creating a new field. In our case it was Phone Extension which was a string value in Marketo previously.
Issues with the Marketo external authentication blanking out our Marketo values because Cvent changed the way certain fields authenticated. For example our Province field would have the fully spelt out name such as Ontario. Cvent modified their authentication with a province code (in this case ON). When Cvent tried to populate the Province field, it was looking for "ON" and did not recognize the full name (Ontario). It then blanked out the Province field and cleared it in Marketo afterwords. We had to convert all of our province fields to the "province codes" to avoid this issue.
- We're trying to figure out if external authentication is even worth it since it seems to be causing more issues for our customers than helping.

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Kim_Gandy1 · ‎10-06-2016

Ayan, our conference team has been using the Cvent/Marketo push API for two months and I haven't heard of any data issues. I'll agree, it wasn't the most intuitive integration process.

Ayan_Talukder · ‎10-11-2016

Thanks for the reply Kim! At first we thought everything was syncing correctly, but we started to do a few spot checks and noticed the odd users not flowing through into Marketo and Salesforce.

When we started to check people in on site, we noticed the discrepancy grow even larger in terms of member status updates.

Josh_Hill13 · ‎10-06-2016

I would contact cvent support. It's also possible there are too many triggers in your system, which may have created issues for updating data.

Ayan_Talukder · ‎10-11-2016

Thanks Josh, we've been going back and forth with Marketo and Cvent's support. They are definitely both helpful in terms of looking into the issue but it's been an ongoing case for over 2 weeks . We'll have to wait and see what the eventual outcome is.

I suspected it to be Marketo unable to handle the dozens of API calls at the same time. We do have many other trigger campaigns running as well, do you think that could be slowing our Marketo instance down?

Anonymous · ‎10-12-2016

Hey Ayan, I'm working on my integration right now and there's a lot to do for the overall integration, and then by event. I could easily see something being missed or done even slightly incorrectly that there could be hiccups. *nervous*

If you learn anything, please keep us updated!

Anonymous · ‎11-01-2016

Ayan,

Did you ever get your integration issues resolved? We've been on Cvent coming on 3 or 4 weeks and our integration has failed horribly. Just had a call with them the other day and they said I did everything correctly and that there is a bug on their end. Waiting to hear more, but so dissapointed. Wondering how you are doing.

Ayan_Talukder · ‎12-13-2016

Hi Amanda,

Sorry for the late reply, didn't see this! So for the last 3 or so months we have been going back and forth between Cvent and Marketo. We have finally been able to get both Cvent and Marketo developers to work together and it seems to be in Marketo's hands now.

We did notice the number of leads that were being updated by Cvent were increasing but there weer still small discrepancies. Our events are done for 2016, but the real test to see if their "fix" works will be Spring 2017.

You can mention that you are facing a similar problem as Esri Canada, and maybe link this thread. Hopefully it sparks something on both of their ends to get something working soon.

I wish the integration with Cvent was as simple as it is with webinar providers. Never have had an issue with WebEx because of the direct integration built in Marketo

Dina_Otero · ‎11-01-2016

Hi Ayan, we are Cvent and Marketo users and ran into a similar issue. We ended up exporting our list and imported it into Cvent. It worked for what we tried to accomplish but was a pain to send emails (ended up doing it from Cvent), track and score activity.

Ayan_Talukder · ‎12-13-2016

Same here! We were manually doing list uploads but figured it defeated the purpose of using the integration. Hopefully they have a fix for early 2017.