Knowledgebase

    Overview Add Leads to Static Lists Use Custom Fields Overview Lead records have two primary components – lead attributes and activity logs. Lead attributes are the fields and field values within the lead record. For example, Job Title is a lead attribute. Lead Name is a lead attribute. Activity logs record the actions Marketo or the lead themselves have taken. For example, sending an email to a lead is an activity that would show in the activity log. If the lead opens the email or visits a tracked page, those activities would show in the activity log as well.   Activities in the activity log are only retained for 90 days, 25 months, or 37 if you have purchased the premium data retention option. The official Marketo Data Retention Policy can be found here: Marketo Activities Data Retention Policy   The main way to store activity data beyond the Data Retention Policy timeframe is to use the Bulk Extract API. There are two other ways you can keep a reference of these activities after the end of the Data Retention period, and they can be referenced within the Marketo UI. This article will show you how that can be done.     Add Leads to Static Lists Static lists will retain lead membership even if the activity of adding the lead to the list has been removed. This will let you have lists dedicated to specific criteria that would otherwise be removed after the data retention time period has been passed.   For example, Smart Campaign membership history is not retained after 25 months. If you are searching for members of a Smart Campaign, but a lead first became a member of the Smart Campaign more than 25 months ago, the search results would not include that lead.   An easy way to work around that is to add your leads to a static list as part of the flow of the campaign. When creating your Smart Campaign, create a new static list with the same corresponding name (makes it easier to identify later). When building the flow of your campaign, add the "Add to List" flow step so that all leads going through the campaign will be logged on the list.   Use Custom Fields Lead attributes and their field values are not affected by the Data Retention Policy. Use Smart Campaigns to populate custom fields with values based on activities your leads take. This will allow you to filter leads by these lead attributes that are not affected by the Data Retention Policy. A side benefit to this is that it is faster to search by lead attributes than by searching through lead activity logs.   Example: This approach can work for many different activities, but let’s use form fill outs as an example.   Let’s say you want to be able to identify leads who have been very active and have filled out more than 5 forms over their lifecycle. You could use the filter “Filled Out Form” with the “Min. Number of Times” constraint set to 5. However, if one of those forms filled out occurred more than 25 months ago, the filter would only be able to access 4 form fill activities in the activity log. Therefore, the lead would not pass the filter.   Instead of using the “Filled Out Form” filter, set up a Smart Campaign to write to custom fields that show you how many forms they’ve filled out, and when the first one was. Here’s how to do it:   1. Create two new custom fields in Marketo, one Score Field, and the second a Date Field.   2. Create a new Smart Campaign   3. Add the trigger “Fills Out Form” set to “is any” to the Campaign Smart List 4. Add these two Flow Steps to the Campaign Flow: Flow Step 1: “Change Score” Score Field Name: your score field name Change: +1   Flow Step 2: “Change Data Value” Add Choice to Flow Step Choice 1: If “your score field name”  “is empty” Attribute “your score field name” New Value: {{system.date}} Default Choice: Do Nothing This campaign will listen for any time a lead fills out a form, add +1 to your score field, and if it’s the very first form they’ve ever filled out, it will log the date of when it was done. If the lead has ever filled out a form in the past, there will already be a date value in the date field, so the flow choice would just skip over it and do nothing. Results You’ll See: With the original goal of identifying leads who have filled out more than 5 forms you’ll be able to filter for leads that have filled out at least 5 forms. In addition, this campaign will let you search for leads based on when they had filled out their very first form, regardless of how long ago it was. Since it’s stored in a lead field, it’s a lead attribute that is not affected by the Data Retention Policy at all.

  If you have submitted a support case and you feel that the case was improperly handled or that the solution being offered does not meet the communicated Marketo support expectations, then we would welcome the opportunity to look deeper at your specific support engagement and work with you on delivering a better resolution. Caution: If the item you're looking to escalate is related to a Production Down incident, please call the support line for your region to receive immediate assistance. Support Manager escalations are only handled during normal business hours. The phone numbers for each region are listed below, follow the prompts for P1: Americas: +1.877.270.6586, Direct: +1.650.376.2303 Europe, Middle East, & Africa: +353 (0)1 242 3030,  UK: 0800 151 3030 Asia Pacific: +61 2 8031 8188 Japan: +81.03.4233.9014 How to Escalate: Option 1: Step 1. Navigate to the "Case Management" area of the support portal either by mousing over the Support tab and selecting "Case Management" or clicking the Support tab and click on the “My Case Management” button. NOTE: You will need an open or recently closed case in order to escalate to support leadership. Step 2. From here you will need to click on either an open or a recently closed* case: *Support Cases that have been closed for longer than 10 days are no longer eligible to be re-opened and we ask that you open a new support ticket for your current issue prior to escalating to a Support Manager. We ask that you have an open support ticket for a Support Manager to be able to address specific issues. Step 3. After selecting a case, click on the Escalate to Manager button: Step 4. A pop up will display and you will need to the purpose for the escalation and click on the “Escalate” button. Once your support escalation case has been submitted a Marketo Support Manager will contact you within 1 business day of your support region's support hours to address the issue. Option 2: You can email supportescalations@marketo.com to escalate your issues to our support management team. NOTE: Be sure to include your currently open Support Case number and the details of your escalation. This will help to ensure that a Support Manager can quickly identify the case tied to your escalation and follow up with you. Before you send an email to supportescalations@marketo.com you must have a current active support case closed support case that has been closed or is pending.  Support Escalations are focused on the handling of current or recent cases.  Brand new technical support issues that are sent to Support Escalations will be re-routed to our general case flow.    

Summary Estimating the external storage requirements for your Marketo Engage Database Issue I want to extract all of my data from Marketo Engage and store it. How much storage space will I need? Environment Marketo Engage and External Systems Solution Summary There is no repeatable method to accurately estimate the amount of storage you will need to extract and store your Marketo Engage database. Standing in the way of good estimation is data availability, field selection, and storage method. Any accurate estimate will take into account the potential sizes of each type of data and their quantities (known to data scientists as "facts and dimensions"). Determining ranges for these values takes a lot of preparation and may require a high level of skill. IMPORTANT NOTE: Estimating Database size is hard so any estimate used to make business decisions should be made in cooperation with a database or application architect or other qualified professional. Scope Some information won't be extracted. Information about anonymous leads, for example, cannot be extracted. Some of the data that can be extracted may not be needed at all. Selecting the right data for your needs is the best practice as it reduces the required storage and leads to a more efficient extraction process. Field Definitions How the fields are defined in the target system will affect how big the stored data is. Depending on your storage format, padding may play a role in the size of your extracted database. As an example, the "Country" field in Marketo is a string of up to 255 characters. You could chose to store 255 characters for every country value. Or you may choose a format that uses a variable amount of space. You might also know that the longest country name is "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" meaning that 199 of those characters will always be extra so you truncate the value from Marketo storing the first 56 characters only. Each choice will have an impact on the size of your extracted database. Estimating 199 unnecessary characters per lead and making similar decisions for other fields will add up to increased storage requirements and slower extraction time. Format Once the desired data is identified, the next step is to extract, transform and load (ETL) the data from Marketo Engage into your storage system. The data returned by Marketo's API is plain old text which is usually formatted as JSON or CSV. For the information to be useful, you will transform it from JSON into the format necessary for your storage system. That format could be an Excel spreadsheet, Microsoft SQL database or a schema-agnostic database like Azure Cosmos DB. How the data is formatted and encoded will make a big difference in the amount of storage needed. Take this simple example: a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with "Marketo Engage" in cell A1. I saved that same file in four different formats which resulted in files ranging from 1 KB to 25 KB. The format you store you information in may have a bigger impact on your final storage requirement than the data itself. This is a article attached image   To help illustrate the impact of the storage system, take a look at this guide for Microsoft SQL Database size estimation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/databases/estimate-the-size-of-a-database  Functionalization Once you've extracted your data, what are you going to do with it? Archiving your data (simply storing it) is easiest and comes with the fewest contraints. A compressed archive (Zip file) will save dramatically on storage space at the cost of functionality and ease of use. Functionalizing your data (using it in an application) requires more: at least better speed and searchability: typically a relational database. An application will often require additional data and that will need to be accounted for too. Facts and Dimensions: Do the Math It's a lot of work to get to this stage. Once you've determined how your extracted data will be stored, you can set upper and lower bounds on the sizes for each object type extracted (lead, email, activity, etc). These are your facts. Then multiply those values by the number of each type of record. These are your dimensions. Add to that the overhead of your target storage system and its functional requirements to generate your final estimates.    

Once you have submitted a case to Marketo support, we provide a simple way of staying connected to your case and the cases submitted from your company through the Marketo Support Portal. You can access the support portal through your Marketo instance by selecting Community in the top right corner: This is a article attached image You can also access the support portal directly at https://support.marketo.com and login with your Marketo credentials (login and password). This will not work for users with SSO.   Once you are in the support portal you can Create a Case for Marketo Support or you can also review any cases that are open and being worked on by support or review your case history. Navigate to My Case management: This is a article attached image From the My Cases navigation you can access the following case views: This is a article attached image My Recent Cases* - Cases that you have opened in the past 30 days All Company Recent Cases* - Cases that any authorized support contact has opened in the past 30 days My Open Cases – Cases created by you that are being triaged by Support and pending Support’s response and are more than 30 days old My Closed Cases – Cases that were created by you and are now closed My Awaiting Fix Cases – Cases that were created by you where Marketo is developing a fix which will be implemented at a later date All Company Closed Cases – Cases that were created by you or your colleagues that are now closed All Company Open Cases - All open cases submitted for the account Company Awaiting Fix Cases – Cases that were created by you or your colleagues where Marketo is developing a fix which will be implemented at a later date Management Escalations - Escalations opened by you or your colleagues  Survey Cases - Surveys that are available for you to fill out after a case is closed *Cases that have been opened for more than 30 days will move from Recent cases to Open cases   To view specific case details, click a case number. This is a article attached image From the Case Details, you can perform the following: Close your Case - Select the "My Case is Resolved" button to close your case Add Comments - Provide additional comments to support or respond to a Support question Add Attachment - Provide any screenshots or documents that will help illustrate the issue you are reporting   If your case has been closed there are two options available to you.   Reopen - You can reopen your case if you are not satisfied with the case resolution by adding a comment in the case. Case Survey - Once your case has closed, please consider offering feedback on the level of Support you received.

Issue How to use the REST API to check for deleted leads. Solution You would need to use the specific endpoint This will pull a list of leads deleted within a specific timeframe.  Deletions older than 14 days may be pruned.      

Issue Executing a GET API call to retrieve a list of available activity types in the target instance using the '/rest/v1/activities/types.json' endpoint, resolves with an unexpected attribute name for a field with the display name ID in the context of Marketo Custom Objects. An example of that may be a Marketo Custom Object with the following name: '3 to be', as can be shown in the image below: One of the '3 to be' Marketo custom object fields name is 'ID'. (highlighted in red). When performing a GET API call using the '/rest/v1/activities/types.json' endpoint, you will be getting a list of available activity types in the target instance, along with associated metadata of each type, however for a Marketo custom object with an ID field name, you may see it returns back with a slightly different name, in this case, it would be returning the following output for my test Marketo Custom Object activity: { "id": 100019, "name": "Add to 3 to be", "primaryAttribute": { "name": "3 to be ObjRef", "dataType": "integer" }, "attributes": [ { "name": "3 To Be Person Id", "dataType": "integer" }, { "name": "ID (3)", "dataType": "string" }, { "name": "Linkfield4", "dataType": "string" } ] } ], Here's an image of what it may look like when making the call using POSTMAN: In fact, the character in the brackets next to the ID field represents the very first character of your Marketo Custom Object name.    Environment Customers who have Marketo Custom Objects where one of the custom object fields is named 'ID'. Solution If this is interrupting your business, you may want to select a different name for the ID field under your Marketo Custom Object. (ie. ID number, Transaction ID etc.) Root Cause This behavior is expected and is a result of the 'ID' field being a unique field in the context of Marketo custom objects world and while it may be possible to create a Marketo Custom Object field with the name 'ID', it may be better to give it a distinct name that will be better describing what kind of ID field it is.   

Issue Per our developer page: https://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/assets/programs/#update, it is possible to update tags on your existing program When updating a program tag within an existing program, you may encounter an error below given the tag and its values are correct.  {"code": "709","message": "Required tags are mandatory"}]} Environment Any API clients when performing the Web Service API Solution The workaround is to have the tag updated via the UI. Root Cause "Updating tags is a destructive operation." Any attempt to update the tags of a program must include valid values for all of the required tags for a program. Unless the 'specific' tag type you are working on is the only required tag type in the instance, then that is possible to update it using the API. Otherwise, you'll encounter the error above as it is a system behaviour.

Issue Error 603 'Access Denied' is returned for when an API user with the default Admin role attempts to make an API call http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/error-codes/   Environment REST API Users and Roles Permissions Solution To avoid this error, create a new role: Create, Delete, Edit and Change a User Role | Adobe Marketo Root Cause It is expected that when the default 'Admin' role is used for an API user, attempting to make API calls will return error 603.

Issue For an API call, you are using more than value for an input parameter Solution If your input contains more than one datapoint, the responses will be returned in the same order.   Root Cause Both the input & response are formatted as arrays Environment API

  Overview Add Leads to Static Lists Use Custom Fields Overview Lead records have two primary components – lead attributes and activity logs. Lead attributes are the fields and field values within the lead record. For example, Job Title is a lead attribute. Lead Name is a lead attribute. Activity logs record the actions Marketo or the lead themselves have taken. For example, sending an email to a lead is an activity that would show in the activity log. If the lead opens the email or visits a tracked page, those activities would show in the activity log as well.   Activities in the activity log are only retained for 25 months, or 37 if you have purchased the premium data retention option. The main way to store activity data beyond the Data Retention Policy timeframe is to use the Bulk Extract API. There are two other ways you can keep a reference of these activities after the end of the Data Retention period, and they can be referenced within the Marketo UI. This article will show you how that can be done.     Add Leads to Static Lists Static lists will retain lead membership even if the activity of adding the lead to the list has been removed. This will let you have lists dedicated to specific criteria that would otherwise be removed after the data retention time period has been passed.   For example, Smart Campaign membership history is not retained after 25 months. If you are searching for members of a Smart Campaign, but a lead first became a member of the Smart Campaign more than 25 months ago, the search results would not include that lead.   An easy way to work around that is to add your leads to a static list as part of the flow of the campaign. When creating your Smart Campaign, create a new static list with the same corresponding name (makes it easier to identify later). When building the flow of your campaign, add the "Add to List" flow step so that all leads going through the campaign will be logged on the list.         Use Custom Fields Lead attributes and their field values are not affected by the Data Retention Policy. Use Smart Campaigns to populate custom fields with values based on activities your leads take. This will allow you to filter leads by these lead attributes that are not affected by the Data Retention Policy. A side benefit to this is that it is faster to search by lead attributes than by searching through lead activity logs.   Example: This approach can work for many different activities, but let’s use form fill outs as an example.   Let’s say you want to be able to identify leads who have been very active and have filled out more than 5 forms over their lifecycle. You could use the filter “Filled Out Form” with the “Min. Number of Times” constraint set to 5. However, if one of those forms filled out occurred more than 25 months ago, the filter would only be able to access 4 form fill activities in the activity log. Therefore, the lead would not pass the filter.   Instead of using the “Filled Out Form” filter, set up a Smart Campaign to write to custom fields that show you how many forms they’ve filled out, and when the first one was. Here’s how to do it:   1. Create two new custom fields in Marketo, one Score Field, and the second a Date Field.   2. Create a new Smart Campaign   3. Add the trigger “Fills Out Form” set to “is any” to the Campaign Smart List     4. Add these two Flow Steps to the Campaign Flow: Flow Step 1: “Change Score” Score Field Name: your score field name Change: +1   Flow Step 2: “Change Data Value” Add Choice to Flow Step Choice 1: If “your score field name”  “is empty” Attribute “your score field name” New Value: {{system.date}} Default Choice: Do Nothing       This campaign will listen for any time a lead fills out a form, add +1 to your score field, and if it’s the very first form they’ve ever filled out, it will log the date of when it was done. If the lead has ever filled out a form in the past, there will already be a date value in the date field, so the flow choice would just skip over it and do nothing.       Results You’ll See: With the original goal of identifying leads who have filled out more than 5 forms you’ll be able to filter for leads that have filled out at least 5 forms. In addition, this campaign will let you search for leads based on when they had filled out their very first form, regardless of how long ago it was. Since it’s stored in a lead field, it’s a lead attribute that is not affected by the Data Retention Policy at all.      

Summary Creating many-to-many relationships with Marketo custom objects requires an intermediary object with one link to a Lead or Company and another link to a secondary custom object. Here's how to solve the problem of the secondary custom object not showing up to be selected as the linked object. Issue Creating a many-to-many or N:N custom object structure such that a lead or company can be associated with multiple custom objects and a custom object can be associated with multiple leads or companies at the same time. When adding a link to the secondary custom object, that secondary object is not list as an available linked object.     Solution If you find that the custom object you'd like to link to is not list in the "Link Object" list, there are two things two check: The secondary CO must be approved. The secondary CO must not have any link type fields. Since it's not possible to change a link field once a custom object is approved, if you already have link fields, the only solution is discard the secondary custom object and create a new one. Recreate the custom object without link fields. Then, in the intermediary object, the target object will show up as an available link object.  More detail can be found at:  Understanding Marketo Custom Objects Add Marketo Custom Object Link Fields - Create a Link Field for a Many-to-Many Structure Root Cause The secondary custom object type is not approved. - or - The secondary custom object type is approved type and has link fields. Environment Marketo Custom Objects Many to Many Relationship - N:N Link Fields

Summary When submitting a file for bulk import via the REST API, the uploads appears to stall with no response. Issue Occasionally Bulk Import API calls will "hang" or "stall" never returning a response. This may appear to be a blank or missing response when the API is actually still waiting for the end of the file to be transferred. Solution You can add the following header: 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked' to your API calls and it will fix this issue. Please note that adding this header on the client side will cause cURL to send data in chunks. For more information on chunked file transfer, see Wikipedia: Chunked Transfer Encoding Environment REST API Bulk Import

  What is the Email API? What is the Email API used for? What is Email 2.0? Does the Email API Work on Email 2.0 Assets? Will the Email API Break when Enabling Email Experience 2.0? How Are 1.0 Assets Upgraded to 2.0 Assets? What to Do When an Email Was Accidentally Converted to Email 2.0 format?     What is the Email API? API stands for Application Programming Interface and the Email API allows an automated process to create and edit emails in Marketo. There are also other API calls that involve emails, such as Approve Snippet (assuming the Snippet is used in an Email) and Clone Program (assuming the Program contains Emails). There are also API calls to create and update Email Templates. Essentially, the API can do many things that you can also do through the Marketo user interface, but then in an automated fashion.     What is the Email API used for? There are many scenarios: an external system could create Emails in Marketo using data that lives outside of Marketo. A translation service provider could clone a master Email, translate it to many languages, then save them back into Marketo as localized Emails. A reporting system could extract Emails from Marketo to use in reports that are generated outside of Marketo. An external system could Clone a Program that contains Emails, then populate the Program Tokens and schedule the Email to be sent out at a specific time. There could be an external email template creation system that creates new Email templates in Marketo through the API.     What is Email 2.0? “Email Experience 2.0” is the new Marketo product feature with the enhanced email editor, documented here: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Email+Editor+v2.0+Overview. It can be switched on in Admin > Email > Edit Email Editor Settings. All Emails and Email Templates also have a version number, either 1.0 (the old version) or 2.0 (the new version). If we refer to “Email 2.0 asset” we mean an email or email template in the new upgraded 2.0 format.     Does the Email API Work on Email 2.0 Assets? Yes.     Will the Email API Break when Enabling Email Experience 2.0? No. Enabling Email 2.0 will not automatically upgrade Emails or Email Templates to the new 2.0 format. The Email API can still create new Emails and Email Templates in the 1.0 format.  However – after enabling Email 2.0 – any Email or Email Template that is created or edited and approved through the Marketo User Interface will automatically be upgraded to the 2.0 format.     How Are 1.0 Assets Upgraded to 2.0 Assets? If you edit an “Approved" or “Approved with Draft” 1.0 Email with Email 2.0 enabled, the draft is converted to the 2.0 format. You can still discard the draft to go back to the approved 1.0 format. Once you approve the email and it becomes 2.0, the Email cannot be converted back to 1.0. If you edit a “Draft” 1.0 Email (never been approved), this will automatically be converted to 2.0 with no option to revert back to the 1.0 format. The same applies to Email Templates.     What to Do When an Email Was Accidentally Converted to Email 2.0 format? If an Email or Email Template was accidentally converted to the 2.0 format, you’d have to copy the asset contents to a text editor, disable Email 2.0, then create a new 1.0 asset using the content that you copied.