We’ve all seen (and hopefully obeyed) this warning in Admin » Tags » Channels:
But do you know why you can’t change the box that says “Opened” to “Clicked” — and vice versa — to swap their steps in the progression?
Because those textboxes modify the dynamic, friendly Program Status Name that’s currently associated with a fixed Program Status ID.
The Status ID is like a database primary key.🞷 Some are pre-created by the system (for builtin channels/statuses). Others are created when you add the new status in Admin. Each ID is tied to a single channel, that is, the status named “Engaged” in the Email channel and the status named “Engaged” in the Webinar channel always have different IDs.🞷🞷
Here are some example Status IDs:
Note how the IDs
- don’t start with 0 or 1
- aren’t contiguous
- aren’t in the same order as the steps
They should be considered effectively random. The (current) mapping between IDs and names isn’t even returned by the REST API, which can cause confusion when names change!
Under the hood, a person’s status is linked to the Status ID, not the name. So it should be clear that if you swap the names in the Status column, people who previously were “Opened” would be labeled as “Clicked” and vice versa. That’s not what you want, or let’s say extremely rarely what you want. Instead, if you want to change step values, change the Step column.
You probably already knew this, but now you know why.😛
NOTES
🞷 It probably is a primary key in the underlying SQL database. But it’s best to not think of Marketo in limiting RDBMS terms.
🞷🞷 Status names are unique per-channel, meaning there can only be Status ID with a given name at any point in time. However, the name may be used for different IDs over time. That’s what the warning is about!
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