Hey Marketo Community! Some of you may have suffered the second Marketo outage within the last 3 months. We are so worried that this will happen again and want to be cautious and create a backup/alternative plan. Has anyone thought about this?
For the first outage, our web forms did not submit so we put in an error message on the web forms to contact sales via phone or email.
Any ideas to share would be great!
Yes! Since this is the second time in 3 months, we've put together an action plan so we can quickly remediate issues when a catastrophic failure occurs with Marketo. When Marketo went down, it severely affected our site, our salesforce, and our Google Adwords ads so our intention is immediate damage control. Mind you, our plan is pretty primitive and not sophisticated at all.
1. Use a service that tracks response time/uptime such as DownNotifier.com to track our "https://app-xxxx.marketo.com/" and "https://www.pages.ourdomain.com" so we know if access to Marketo or our assets ever goes down. I'm assuming that the forms are tied to the same server that pages are on, so if pages go down we'll know our other assets are down as well.
2. Have backup forms for all of our website forms (we use gravity forms in WordPress) and a google spreadsheet index of the locations of forms on our site, so if anything goes down we can switch it out ASAP to prevent loss of leads and site performance.
3. Have a popup bar ready that notifies visitors that our marketo-hosted assets (only our eBooks) are currently unavailable. Luckily, our brochure, client testimonials, blogs and videos are all hosted on our regular web server. Alternatively, you can index where links to Marketo content are such as a page of all your ebooks, and disable/redirect those links.
4. Double check performance on your site, if your Munchkin code is already loaded at the bottom of your page and it's slowing your load time down, go in and remove it. (find out how to remove it beforehand so you can act quick)
5. We couldn't do anything for google analytics other than disable our ads, which Google does automatically anyways if your target URL does not work. We removed Marketo Sales Insight from our Salesforce layouts so it wouldn't affect the rest of the org who are using Salesforce.
6. Pray Marketo is working their ***** off to fix it.
7. Reinstate everything once it's fixed.
Hope this helps!