Archiving, It's a process of storing old assets into a particular folder which is no longer needs to be used regularly but you want to keep them for future reference and historical backup. Even in Marketo "archive" word is being used with a similar purpose.
Now the question is why we should archive our old assets when they can be kept?
My answer is clear, I don't want to create any confusion inside my Marketo instance. It should look neat and clean so that even a newbie can understand the folder structure and campaigns we are doing. He should not sit and hold his head to comprehend the simple yet very important thing.
Apart from this, there are multiple reasons why one should keep archiving old assets. My reasons are:
1. The folder and assets are no longer visible in search results. If you search for a Program or Event that’s inside an archived folder, the results return a collapsed view of the archived folder which means it will improve your search result and you would not unnecessarily check old programs and events.
2. The assets in the folder no longer appear in auto-suggest
3. Archived templates are not available when creating an email or landing page in Design Studio
4. Archived pages can’t be used in landing page test groups
5. Archiving doesn't unapproved your assets (landing pages or emails) and doesn't deactivate your smart campaigns which means if they are being used somewhere and there will be no harmful effect.
6. If any program/event is outdated but we have not deactivated the smart campaigns, it directly affects the performance of Marketo instance
7. And for me, most important one will always be neat and clean folder structure so that anyone who is working on my instance could understand the view at once glance.
Functionality that will not change when archiving:
Source: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Understanding+Folders#UnderstandingFolders-ArchiveaFold...
- Global search still finds results in archived folders
- An asset that’s in use will continue to work even after it’s archived
- You can use a filter to select archived assets for use in reports
- Archived assets are not deactivated. They must also be deactivated if you want them to stop running
In Marketo, you can convert existing folders into an archive folder. These folders exists in Marketing Activities, design studio, and database.
There is no specific instruction to archive your folder but I will still suggest to keep them clean so that when you require to find something, it's not difficult for you. I am doing it in this way:
For example:
Root folder - India Archive
Then subfolders - 2018, 2019, 2020.... so on
- I have a separate folder in each region and then further categorized by year
- Every month, one day is dedicated to archive old lead gen/event programs, email programs, and other assets.
If you have not started it yet then start it today but I will highly recommend this that one should keep archiving old assets to keep the Marketo instance clean.
Hope this will be helpful to many of you and I would also like to hear your take on this.
Best Regards,
Sant Singh Rathaur
Connect with me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sant-singh-rathaur/
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