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(Article Updated - August 2024) Overview A blocklist is a database of IP addresses or domains that have been associated with the sending of unsolicited commercial email or spam. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and business email networks use information from blocklists to filter out unwanted email. As a result there can be a drop to inbox delivery rates if the IPs or domains involved with sending email are listed on a blocklist. Marketo’s Email Delivery and Compliance team monitors blocklist activity on our IPs and domains daily. When an impactful listing occurs, we reach out to the blocklist, attempt to identify the sender that triggered it, and work with the blocklist organization to get the listing resolved. There are thousands of blocklists, most will not have a significant impact on your delivery rates. Below, we have compiled a list of the blocklists that commonly appear across our sender ecosystem. Each blocklist has been grouped into a top tier (Tier I) by most impactful, to the bottom least impactful tier (Tier III). These may have little to no impact across our sender network. Tier I Blocklist Spamhaus (SBL) Impact: Spamhaus is the only blocklist that we categorize as a Tier I for a reason: it has by far the greatest impact on delivery. It is the most well-respected and widely used blocklist in the world. A listing at Spamhaus will have a negative effect on your ability to deliver emails to your customer’s inbox and can cause bounce rates of over 50%. Evidence suggests that most of the top North American ISPs use Spamhaus to inform blocking decisions. How it works: Unlike many blocklists, Spamhaus lists senders manually. This means they are proactively watching sender activity, collecting data, and base listings on a number of variables. Most commonly senders are listed for mailing to spam trap addresses that Spamhaus owns. Sometimes Spamhaus will list senders based on recipient feedback as well. Next Steps: Please note that every Spamhaus email can be quite different depending on the information provided and the nature of the listing . Because Spamhaus has multiple types of listings, the remediation steps are based on which type of blocklisting has occurred. We have listed the most common types to affect Marketo customers, from most to least impactful. Impact can range from a full block of top severity, to a partial block that is less severe (CSS Data, DBL). If remediation isn’t performed and the problem not addressed, these listings can increase in severity and turn into a full blocklisting. Spamhaus Blocklistings Types SBL (full blocklisting) Considered the most impactful. Remediation steps: Our team monitors closely for Spamhaus listings. Once alerted to the listing, we send an email notifying the customer, and reach out to the Spamhaus contact to start the remediation process. Only a Marketo delivery team member should be in direct correspondence with the Spamhaus contact, to speak on behalf of the customer, and to relay their questions and instructions, ensuring quick resolution and reduced impact. Senders that trigger this listing on a shared IP range will be moved to a more isolated, penalty range (IPB), so as not to impact the other shared senders. Those affected on a Dedicated IP, only impact their own sending and will not be moved. However, depending on the severity of the issue, our team may need to revoke a customer’s ability to send any emails until full resolution. The listing will last until Spamhaus is satisfied that the offending sender has taken the appropriate steps to mitigate the problem. SBL CSS Customers are alerted of the listing with an email containing all the information needed to immediately begin the remediation process. This is part of an automated trigger listing, that allows for a customer to delist directly on the Spamhaus website, after they’ve completed remediation. Remediation steps: Customers will go to the Spamhaus IP lookup website, at https://check.spamhaus.org, where they can check on the status of their IP and continue to monitor it in real time, until it is no longer listed there. Follow the remediation and delisting instructions provided, and check for specific details in the blocklist notification email. DBL (Domain blocklisting) Customers will receive an email notification alerting of the company domain being listed. The email will contain specific information to help narrow down and identify which email source likely triggered it within Marketo. It’s important to note that any email sent from outside of Marketo, that contained the company domain, is suspect. This means, if the sender uses multiple IPs and/multiple email platforms, then any of those could be the source. Remediation steps: Follow the detailed instructions in the email, which will also provide a link to the Spamhaus Domain reputation checker webpage, to check the real time listing status of the affected domain. Once the email source is identified and cause addressed, this customer will follow the online instructions to request to be delisted. Tier II Blocklist SpamCop Impact: SpamCop is not used by any of the major North American ISPs to inform blocking decisions, but it makes it to the Tier II list because it can have a significant impact on B2B email campaigns. SpamCop is considered a Tier I one blocklist for B2B marketers but a Tier II for B2C marketers. SpamCop is a dynamic IP blocklist, that can affect a single IP or a subset of IPs Typically, the block will automatically lift within one business day, but can take longer for relisted IPs. To have triggered a SpamCop listing likely means the sender has a list management problem that should be addressed. How it works: SpamCop lists IPs for one of two reasons: Either the email hit SpamCop spam trap addresses OR A SpamCop user has reported the email unwanted. Most of SpamCop’s spam traps are previously valid addresses that have not been active for 12 months or longer. Remediation steps: If you are seeing a significant number of bouncing emails caused by a SpamCop blocked IP but aren’t sure if your email activity triggered the listing, first identify whether you are sending on a shared sender network or not. If sending from a shared IP range when this occurs, you or any other customer sending from the same network may have contributed to the IP block. This IP block will automatically get dropped within a business day. For those on a Dedicated IP that trigger a listing, refer to the above remediation steps and resources, to address the list management issue. Tier III Blocklist (Low/ No impact ) These are considered the lowest tier and therefore cause the least impact across the Marketo sender ecosystem. Some of these blocklists were more impactful at one time, while others are only impactful based on the sender region (Manitu). Others still can suddenly flare up (Lashback). There are also many blocklists that are ignored (0spam), and are not taken seriously because they do not provide any means to delist once on the list (NoSolicitado) or that they charge money to have the listing removed ( UCEPROTECT ). The pay-to-delist model is not well respected in the email industry. When using blocklist tool checkers, such as MXToolBox, many blocklists will appear, but very few are relevant. Here is our selection of Blocklists you may come across that are least impactful: Project Honey Pot SpamAssassin URIBL/SURBL DrMX PSBL 0spam HostKarma Ascams ZapBL Barracuda Trendmicro Inc. Cloudmark Proofpoint Invaluement ISP Blocklists Some ISPs use internal blocklists to make blocking decisions. Examples include AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook and Hotmail. If your IP is being blocked by one of these networks, and those networks have a large presence in your lists, a block of this kind could have a noticeable negative impact on delivery. Marketo monitors for significant ISP blocks. Those experiencing deliverability issues with emails not making it to the Inbox and bulking in the spam folder may benefit from additional services with our Email Delivery Consultants. Remediation Steps: Email Delivery Compliance Team works to resolve any ISP blocks. ISP blocks are are usually resolved or lifted within less than 24 hours of a delisting request. Customers experiencing significant blocks for Microsoft domains (outlook.com, live.com, microsoft.com), can submit a request to the delivery team to seek mitigation on their behalf. Additional Resources: Blocklist Deep Dive Abuse Report Deep Dive What is a spamtrap, or spam trap, and why does it matter? Blocklist remediation Blocklist resolution flowchart Successful lead reconfirmation What is a blocklist?

Issue You are trying to manually edit a lead record to remove the value of the Email field but the change doesn't save. Solution Marketo enforces this as a required field for deduplication purposes and won't allow a direct manual edit as a preventative measure. Removing the field can create duplicates, so it's generally recommended that instead of removing the field you maintain the record in your CRM or mark this record as marketing suspended to avoid inadvertent communications. However, if you need to remove the value there are two workarounds to this issue. 1) Create a smart campaign with smart list criteria that isolates that specific lead record, with a Change Data Value flow step. Specify Email as the attribute and the New Value as NULL. This will clear out the value for that field. 2) You can remove the email address from that record in your CRM. Marketo treats your CRM as the source of authority, so removing that value in your CRM will sync down to Marketo during the next sync cycle.

Issue Description: The Activity Log shows "Fill out a form" without a page visit. How users could fill out a form without visiting the page? Issue Resolution: Google Chrome introduced Incognito. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer implemented Private Browsing. Pages that users visit in Private Browsing/Incognito will not leave traces, like cookies, on users' computers after they close all open windows. A normal visit to any page is not tracked during visits, regardless the navigation path. That includes other pages after the form is filled out. The new Do Not Track feature is a contributing factor for apparently incomplete Activity Logs. When users turn on the Do-not-track feature, the browser tells every website they visit (as well as their advertisers and other content providers) that they do not want their browsing behavior tracked. Honoring this setting is voluntary — individual websites are not required to respect it. Websites that do honor this setting should automatically stop tracking your behavior without any further action from users.

Issue A Change Data Value activity gets recorded on a person record but the Updated At field for the record doesn't get changed to reflect it. Solution The "Updated At" field in Marketo is a system managed field that gets refreshed any time that there is a data value change to a person field, but not when the field is on the company object instead. To confirm what object the field in question is on, search for it in Field Management and check what folder it is located in. The folder Info (or Lead Info) contains person fields while company fields are contained within the Company Info folder.

Issue Issue Description When a lead is created through an API call, the Reason and Source attributes say "Web Service API" with no further detail. Solution Issue Resolution As described in the doc here, https://docs.marketo.com/display/DOCS/Understanding+System+Managed+Fields, "Source" and "Reason" fields are managed by Marketo: Web Service API for Original Source Type means Person was discovered by a web service API. For Registration Source Type, it states that Person was created via SOAP/REST API When a lead is created via API, no additional "Source" or "Reason" is provided to Marketo. A possible workaround is to create a custom field and populate it as needed through the API.

Issue There is a noticeable delay between when campaign is run and affected person records are updated and activity records are written to. Solution Check the Campaign Queue. If the affected campaign is backlogged in the queue, the only resolution is to wait for higher priority jobs to clear. To check the Campaign Queue go into the Marketing Activities tile and click on the Campaign Queue Tab. Campaign queue is read only and cannot be reordered. Plan accordingly with very large campaigns to give time to process during off hours or slow times.

Issue Issue Description You receive notification that Campaign Failed in trying to update Segmentation for leads. Solution To troubleshoot this issue review the Segmentations for the following: Click on the Segmentation to pop up in a dialog box with the failed Segment(s) If a Segment failed to approve, review the Smart List filters for missing values or errors in the smart list logic of the Segment. When errors have been fixed, approve the Segment, review again if the notification occurs again.

Issue How to copy the data from one field to another field using tokens. Solution It’s very easy and it can be achieved through a Smart Campaign. Create a Smart Campaign and set up the Smart List to target the specific leads you want. In the Flow, use the Change Data Value step. You would need to choose the field you are copying to as the Attribute, and the new value as token {{lead.fieldYouAreCopyingFrom}}. When you run the campaign, the values will be copied across. Be careful when doing this as the process cannot be reversed and any existing data in the field you are copying to will be destroyed. Note: Use appropriate tokens for the field, if the field is available under lead use lead tokens otherwise company tokens.

Issue Person/Lead Source is empty. Why isn't it populating? Solution Marketo does not automatically assign Person Source. We do populate Original Source Type. Assigning credit for a Lead can only be determined by someone with intimate knowledge of a company's marketing strategies. If someone fills out a form, Marketo doesn't know if they were brought to that form by an email blast, TV commercial, talked to a salesperson, or any number of other reasons. If they came in through a List Import, they could have attended a Tradeshow and signed up there, they could have been exported by a CRM and are being imported, or any number of other ways. There are many discussions on best practices for handling Lead Source attribution in the Community. If you need assistance setting up Smart Campaign to update the Lead Source based on your specific business criteria, please contact Marketo Support.

Issue Person record's Activity Log shows repeat Company Name changes without any Data Value Change being logged. In this example screenshot, we can see that the person had the Company Name set back to the correct value by the CRM sync, but there is no record of the Company Name being changed in the first place. This is a article attached image Environment Person records showing the change are all part of the same Account. One person on that holding Account fills out a form that updates the field "Company Name" to a value that is different from the Account Name CRM sync corrects the Company Name field back to Account Name Solution STEPS TO RESOLVE: 1. Find the lead that change the Company Name field on the account with a Smart List filter: DATA VALUE CHANGED Attribute: Company Name New Value: [Company Name from form fill-out] Previous Value: [Account Name] This is a article attached image 2. Locate the Data Value Change in the Activity Log 3. Check the date and time of the Data Value Change 4. Check that timeframe on other affected records 5. The timeframe of the Data Value Change back to the Account Name will approximately match the timeframe of the logged Data Value Change, showing that the update to the one person was the cause of the update for all others on that account. Root Cause Marketo uses Company Name as the identifier for the Account object. If you have multiple people on the account and one of them changes the Company Name via a form fill-out, the Company Name is changed for all other people on that Account. This change happens on the back end, so you will not see it until the CRM changes it back to the correct value in the next sync cycle.

Issue Lead activity log shows "Change segment" or "Add to Segment" for a segmentation (i.e. "Change Title to "Directors") The named segmentation ("Title") does not show up in the segmentation list in Database Environment Marketo instance with the Target Account Management feature Solution Even though the activity log shows a segment activity, the segment is actually a Persona, which is a feature of Target Account Management.

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.

Marketo Support's Mission is: To provide fast and friendly world-class support through creative, flexible solutions to empower Marketo Automation Software success. Areas of Responsibility: Technical Support Engineers (TSEs) are your initial point of contact for any technical questions or concerns. TSEs are responsible for troubleshooting issues within your Marketo instance and common include: My Marketo Marketing Activities Design Studio Lead Database Analytics Revenue Explorer (RCA/RCE) Calendar Deliverability Tools Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Web Personalization (RTP) Admin Community Our TSEs are not web developers and as a result they are unable to troubleshoot most types of custom coding (ie. HTML, JavaScript, XML, etc.). Our support team is able to help with the following types of non-custom code: Simple Munchkin Code Asynchronous Munchkin Code Asynchronous jQuery Munchkin Code SOAP API REST API Our TSEs are here to assist you and our support commitment to our customers is to always work towards providing an above and beyond support experience. Note: Our team is not against looking at custom code and, based on the subject matter expertise, our TSEs might be able to offer suggestions and recommendations, but we do want to make it clear that they are not responsible for fixing or updating any custom code that has been implemented. Response Time Our TSEs are bound to responding to your cases and issues within the Service Level Agreements from your account's level of support services. We track response milestones to ensure that your cases are being handled in a timely manner as dictated by our agreed to Service Level Targets.

Issue If a record which is in a Marketo Campaign Wait Step and is merged into another record, does the winner of the merge continue through the flow? Solution Winner of the merge will continue through the Campaign flow and complete the remaining steps. To prevent this behavior, remove the record from Campaign using the 'Remove From Flow' step. Environment Records merged in Marketo Records merged in SFDC

Issue Single Flow Step to send an email to x number of leads failed Solution Create a smart campaign and override the person restriction to send an email to a number of people that is greater than the campaign restriction Root Cause The number of people selected to send an email from a single flow action exceeds the campaign person restriction/limit. The campaign restrictions apply to the single flow action because a background campaign is generally created to process the single flow action. Environment Single Flow Action Send Email Campaign Restrictions Smart List

Issue The activity log is not recording the Open Email activity for an email send. Solution Issue Resolution Email opens are linked to an individual asset. If a record is sent the same email more than once, only the first open activity will be recorded. If you are not seeing opens record for a record, search the activity history to confirm whether or not the asset has been opened previously. Also, Text-Only emails lack the tracking pixel used to determine whether an email is opened, so Text-Only emails will never show opens in the activity log. In Email Performance Reports, Opens will be backfilled by the report's internal logic if the customer clicks a link in the Text-Only email. Otherwise, opens will not be recorded.

Summary duplicate records with the same email across lead partitions can be affected by uploaded custom object activity Issue System not separating lead partitions for custom object imports Uploading custom object activity affects duplicate records across partitions Custom Object activity import writing to the most recently updated record regardless of partition Solution Use the following workaround: Run an update on the records that should be affected by the custom object activities import. This will make sure they are the most recently updated records among the duplicates Root Cause Normally when you do a list import, it would import into the one partition, whatever partition the list is located in and only impact the record in that one instance. But when you import a Custom Object, it's able the see ALL the records across ALL the partitions. If there are duplicate records, it just looks to see which one was updated most recently and grabs that one for the list import. So if you have lead record in A with Add to Custom Object already completed and you re-import again but the lead record in B has been updated more recently and has NOT had the custom object added to it, you get the duplicate "Add to Custom Object" activity. Environment Multiple lead partitions with duplicate records across them Custom Object activity import

Issue Leads recently imported cannot be found Solution Check if the example leads exist in the partition the workspace has access to. It is possible that the leads cannot be found because the workspace being checked does not have access to the partition the leads exist in. Check if any of the example leads have been deleted: by using the Campaign Inspector to review all of the smart campaigns that contain a Delete Lead flow action. Then check the run history of each smart campaign to see which recently ran and how many people qualified. If there is a significant amount of smart campaigns that contain a delete lead flow action, contact Marketo Support for additional assistance. by checking the delete lead activities via API Check if the example leads' information was changed. For example, if a lead was imported with email address "john@gmail.com" then create a smart list using "Data Value Changed" filter where "previous value" was "john@gmail.com" Root Cause Leads could exist in a partition that has not been searched, the details could have changed, or the leads could have been deleted. Environment Lead Database List Import Workspaces and Partitions Smart Campaign Campaign Inspector

Summary Unable to update Person Source as expected for records created with the LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and Facebook Lead Ads integrations. Issue New records created through LinkedIn Lead Gen forms as well as Facebook Lead Ads results in the records not updating the Person Source field as expected. Solution Person Source may be set to block updates to the field as noted in the example for Block Updates to a Field - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation. To resolve the issue ensure the field is not set to block updates for the desired update method. Alternatively the Person Source values populated by the integrations can be kept and expected values can be updated to include these sources. Root Cause The LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and Facebook Lead Ads integrations automatically update the Person Source to preset values when a new record is created in Marketo through the integrations. Blocking field updates to the field may prevent the value from changing to pre-configured values as a value already exist for the integration created records. Environment LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms Facebook Lead Ads

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