We've recently noticed some campaigns taking a long time to process e.g. almost an hour to make a trigger-based data update. The answer from support is that it's because of the priority that Marketo gives to the campaign queue as outlined here:
https://nation.marketo.com/t5/knowledgebase/how-campaign-processing-works/ta-p/248264
This creates a challenge where our priorities for the campaign queue doesn't match what Marketo developers think our priority should be. For example, Change Status in SFDC Campaign is a medium priority for Marketo but for our company, this is for reporting purposes only and should be the lowest priority. In contrast, Change data value is in many cases a high priority e.g. someone fills out a demo request on our Website and we want to make sure all of the correct data gets populated as soon as possible before our BDR Team is notified. You can see on this page that Send Alert is the highest priority but then means the alert (which has tokenized data in it) goes out without the right data because change data value is low priority.
The suggestion is that each Marketo customer can specify the overall priority for each of these items for their instance of Marketo and then in addition, prioritize certain Smart Campaigns beyond this.
.png)