🗣️ [Mentor Lauren McCormack] 🌟 Adobe Marketo Engage Community Mentorship Program 2024 🌟

[Jon_Chen]

Hello Community, 

Welcome to the Adobe Marketo Engage Community Mentorship Program 2024! This is the featured Community Discussion thread for your Adobe Marketo Engage Community Mentor, Lauren McCormack (@laurenmccormack) who will be here to guide and support you and your peers with your Adobe Marketo Engage questions as you prepare for your Adobe Marketo Engage Business Practitioner Expert (AD0-E559) exam, through to the end of the program.  

A little bit about your Adobe Marketo Engage Community Mentor, Lauren:

Lauren is a 3-time Adobe Marketo Engage Champion and a 6x Marketo Certified Expert. She was part of the first graduating class of 200 MCEs in 2013 at Marketo Summit in San Francisco. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her partner and two children, and she is the Vice President of Consulting at Revenue Pulse.  

 

Aspirants mapped to @laurenmccormack 

1. @zackwooster1 
2. @Julie_Stutes 
3. @berrygirl044 
4. @tcthanawan 
5. @KarinaVidal 
6. @gergana 

How to Participate  

1. Aspirants’ goal is to clear their Adobe Marketo Engage Certification during the duration of the program: May 17th , 2024 – June 21st, 2024.
2. Aspirants: Post your Questions in this thread to connect with your Mentor Lauren, and your fellow Aspirant peers.  
3. You are all preparing for the same Certification, so feel free to use this space to share what you’re learning and collaborate!  

Suggested Next Steps for Aspirants: 

• Update your Community Profile photo with your latest headshot so that you can stand out to your Mentor and Peer Aspirants. 
• Like this thread to confirm your participation in the program 
• Introduce yourself to Lauren and your Aspirant peers by replying to this Thread! Break the ice by introducing yourself (location, org/ company, etc.) and your experience with/ interest in Adobe Marketo Engage 
• Post your Questions to this thread as you begin learning more about the Adobe Marketo Engage Business Practitioner Expert (AD0-E559) certification
• Test your Marketo Engage knowledge by browsing through the Adobe Marketo Engage Community Questions and taking your best shot at answering some Qs! 
• Remember that every post / like / comment you make in your contextual thread and in the Marketo Engage Community throughout the duration of the program helps increase your chance to be recognized by your Mentor and win exclusive Adobe swag, so bring your best efforts! 

Quick links  

• Mentorship Program Link 
• Adobe Marketo Engage Certifications Overview Link 
  • Adobe Marketo Engage Professional (AD0-E555) 
    • AME Professional Exam Prep Guide (requires login)
  • Adobe Marketo Engage Business Practitioner Expert (AD0-E559) 
    • AME Business Practitioner Expert Exam Prep Guide (requires login) 
  • Adobe Marketo Engage Architect Master (AD0-E560) 
    • AME Architect Master Exam Prep Guide (requires login)

We're wishing you all the best as you embark on this learning journey!  

Cheers,  

Jon 

[gergana · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone,

My name is Gergana, and I'm excited to be part of this mentorship program! I live in Milan, Italy, and I have over 8 years of experience with Marketo, both as a practitioner and admin. Currently, I work for The Adecco Group.

I'm aiming to take both the Business Practitioner Exam and the Architect Master Exam. It might be a bit ambitious, but I'm looking forward to the challenge and the opportunity to learn and grow with all of you.

Looking forward to collaborating and learning from @laurenmccormack and all of my fellow aspirants!

Warm regards,

Gergana

[Julie_Stutes]

Hello Everyone!

My name is Julie and I work at the UPS corporate office in Atlanta. I have been working in Marketo for 6 years, building US and international marketing campaigns, but there are many aspects of the platform we do not currently utilize. I look forward to getting exposure to those areas, so I have a more well-rounded knowledge base on what the platform can actually do.

Looking forward to working with all of you!

[laurenmccormack]

Time for the question of the day!

In Marketo's Audit Trail, which of the following actions cannot be tracked?

A) Deletion of a Smart Campaign

B) Changes to user roles and permissions

C) Modifications to an email template

D) Real-time performance metrics of an email send

[berrygirl044]

D! I would track real-time performance metrics of an email send in the smart campaign on the results tab or in the email program. 

[KarinaVidal]

Aaah, that's a good addition to this, @berrygirl044 . I never really thought about the smart campaign as a real-time performance metric, more so a real-time activity feed. We can't see the metrics easily, as in the Email Performance Report asset. However, if we filter it, we can see the activity per person and the metric as a sum at the bottom of the Results tab. You're a genius; I didn't think of this perspective! I love Marketo's ability to display things in multiple ways. It makes me think of DC streets; regardless of the route you take, all roads lead you to the destination. lol 

[berrygirl044]

I think I got carried away seeing "real time" and not focusing on "metrics" in the question. 😂 While I have done it both ways, I probably would just pull a report lol! That's my favorite thing about Marketo - soooo many ways to achieve the same goal!!

[tcthanawan]

I did the same way as well! Checking the real time result in Email tab in smart campaign.
Most of the time, I need to pressure test with the actual result list as some bot activities came through, just to get the real engagement number. Do you guys experience a high number of bot activities in email sends? 

[KarinaVidal]

I personally have not with emails. My usual bot activities tend to be form-related. I usually set up honey pots and cleaning programs to catch and remove leads that do make it through a form in an attempt to free up space in the database. So, I haven't seen bot activities in our emails.

Does your company purchase lists @tcthanawan ? 

[tcthanawan]

Hi Karina, 
We don't have a practice of purchasing a list, but we found that our audience has a security gate on their end. Once an email passes through that security gate, it is often marked as clicked or opened. Marketo recommended we turn on the bot activity filter in the admin setting. However, some still came through.

It is really great to hear you got the automation that cleans up the leads, do you use Marketo form as well? 

[KarinaVidal]

@tcthanawan , yes, we use Marketo forms across our website and on some social ads. 

The issues you two are experiencing are very interesting. I'm fortunate not to be experiencing them at my organization. This one is challenging because you seem to have real users with bot activities due to security parameters set by their org/IT. I'm thinking about validating a user's engagement by setting up hidden links that only a robot would catch, like an email honeypot.

I suggest having a text link the same color as the background, perhaps in the footer. If that link is clicked, you can use it as another exclusion in your list to auto-remove that engagement from your report, similar to what @gergana mentioned about the bot exclusion criteria native to MKTO. Another criterion that can be used is to use an "Any" logic and include links that have been clicked 2+ times since bots will click links only once, but the actual recipient will click a link once, allowing an engagement of 2+ clicks to be recorded. Those two measures, I believe, will be an additional barrier to assist in determining authentic engagement over false ones. 

Things like this require creative thinking since we have no control over the inbox security set by the recipient. But, I'm curious to know your thoughts on the above ideas. If implemented, do share, as I'd love to follow this brewing case study. 🤓

[gergana]

Thanks for all the insightful suggestions so far 🙂

@KarinaVidal, I find the honeypot link in an email to be an interesting approach. However, I'm concerned it might be problematic. From what I recall, using the same color for links and the background can trigger anti-spam algorithms in various email clients, which makes it a bit risky. I should look into this further to confirm, even though these algorithms are often a black box.

Another challenge with this method is that it might exclude legitimate clicks. For instance, if there’s a spike in clicks right after sending, including on the "honeypot" link, and then a contact opens the email two hours later and clicks a link for real, this contact would be excluded from my smart list if I use the "honeypot" click as a filter. It would be useful to have a constraint like "XX seconds duration between clicks," similar to the bot activity filter in admin. This would permit us do better troubleshooting.
For sure the honeypot is a great solution for forms, but in emails, it's a little bit more complicated, I think.

Regarding the second approach, there are a few points to consider:

• Creating a smart list with "link is any" and the constraint "min number of times" = 2 will result in various situations:
  • Contacts with 1 bot activity and 1+ real click(s)
  • Contacts with 2+ real clicks

  • However, this approach will exclude all contacts (without any email security system in place that clicks all the links in a mail) that have in the log only one single real click.

Depending on our goals, this method could be useful for generating a list of potential bot clicks for manual review. But if we need it for reporting purposes, the situation becomes more complicated. 🙂

• I agree that logically a bot clicks a link only once, but upon examining bot activities in our instance, I found that this is not always the case. Here is a screenshot of a contact showing bot clicks, with the highlighted rows indicating clicks on the same link. Although you can't see the details from the screenshot, I assure you it's the same link, and it appears only once in the email. Strangely, the "higher" one has "Is bot activity" set to False, while the "lower" one has "Is bot activity" set to True.
  

Looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts on this and if anyone else, besides me and @tcthanawan, has experienced similar issues.

[KarinaVidal]

All of your points are valid. Also, thanks for sharing screenshots; the visuals helped me better understand what you're experiencing. This issue is more convoluted than I imagined. I've heard about texts and links with the same color potentially causing server issues, but I've never heard, seen, or read the actual problems experienced by someone. I'll need to research and find real cases because the "honeypot" links are HTML codes focused on text design (CSS). @laurenmccormack , with the many organizations your teams have worked with, do you have any insights or experience in mitigating an issue with hidden links that match an email's background? If so, how has a sender's email been impacted?

I'm still curious about this issue because the links will appear clearly in the HTML email version of an email, which, from my understanding, is how these email servers scrape emails to find spam/malware. I wonder, too, if a developer can create a module or add a script in the Email editor to leverage a built-in email "honeypot." 

 Please continue to share your experience. If I discover anything that is low-risk to test before calling upon a developer, I'll continue sharing my findings @gergana .

[laurenmccormack]

Great dialogue so far, team! Yes, bots are an ever-present challenge. I personally have used honeypots, Recaptcha, webhooks, and a sundry assortment of bot filtering capabilities that Marketo has tried to launch in the platform itself. It's an ongoing issue. I personally have an existential crisis when I fill out Recaptchas, wondering if I indeed am a bot myself when I struggle with a corner of a bicycle tire in a square. Plus Recaptcha tends to lower conversions. 

Anyhow, on another topic, how are you all doing with the study guide materials? Are you working your way through the content? Do you have any related questions?

Also, here's our Friday question of the week:

Which of the following is a special feature of the Engagement Program in Marketo?

A) Smart Campaigns: A tool for building complex marketing workflows.

B) Nurture Streams: A mechanism to automate and personalize ongoing communication with leads over time.

C) Email Deliverability: A feature to ensure emails reach the inboxes of recipients.

D) Program Tokens: Variables that can be used to customize content dynamically.

[berrygirl044]

B. Nurture Streams - (One of my favorite Marketo features!)

Studying for the exam is going well! I am using the study guide to help me make my own study sheet. I liked learning about period costs - something I have never used. I believe it was covered on the last exam as well. 

[gergana]

Hi all!

I hope you are all doing well!

I have some questions about Advanced BI Analytics Reporting (formerly known as Revenue Cycle Explorer).
@laurenmccormack, I see that only 4% of the exam will focus on reporting. However, I wanted to understand what type of reporting this refers to. Are we talking about Basic Reporting (and possibly Email Insights), or should we also consider Advanced BI Analytics Reporting.

@all, my company is considering purchasing the Advanced BI Analytics add-on, and I wanted to know if any of you have already used it and what your impressions are. We had it a few years ago, and it was very useful for performing deep dive and out-of-the-box analyses that basic Marketo reporting does not allow. However, at that time, since we weren't using opportunities in Salesforce, the rest of the features were somewhat wasted for us. Now that our processes have evolved (we use opportunities, etc.), we believe it could be interesting again. So, I wanted to hear about your experiences as well.

[laurenmccormack]

Great question! The reporting covered in the MCE is the STANDARD reporting. Here's the full list! 

You'll find questions that ask you where to find information and how to use the following:

The standard reports available in Marketo are as follows:

• Campaign Activity Report
• Campaign Email Performance Report
• Company Web Activity Report
• People Performance Report/ Lead Performance Report
• People by Status Report
• People by Revenue Stage Report
• Landing Page Performance
• Program Performance
• Social Influence
• Engagement Stream Performance Report
• Report type Overview
• Web Page Activity Report
• Email Link Performance

[KarinaVidal]

This is clutch @laurenmccormack , thanks for sharing this gem. I feel like we have a cheat sheet that others do not have; I feel special 😇🤓. You are the best!!!

[laurenmccormack]

Hi team!

Here's our final question for the session! I hope you've found our discussions to be beneficial, and I'm so excited to see what you all do with your Marketo knowledge in the future! If you haven't already, please add me on LinkedIn and know that I'm happy to be a resource for you throughout your career. My door is always open, whether you need a connection, a reference, or an answer to a question, never hesitate to reach out to me.

Now, here's our question:

Which company stakeholders should be included in the process when creating a lead scoring model? (Choose two)

a. Sales
b. Marketing
c. Product Management
d. Chief Executive Officer
e. Board of Directors
f. Finance

And for the two truths and a lie:

• Engagement programs in Marketo are designed to nurture leads over time with automated, targeted content.
• Engagement programs can only send emails; they cannot include other types of interactions or activities.
• You can use Engagement programs to measure the success of your content by tracking engagement metrics like email opens and clicks.

Happy studying, and I wish you all the very best in your Adobe endeavors! Let me know if you have any questions at all as we schedule our exams and finalize our preparations.

[berrygirl044]

Hi Lauren!

Thank you so much for being our mentor, this has been a fun opportunity for me to study for the exam. 

Which company stakeholders should be included in the process when creating a lead scoring model? Sales and Marketing
& the lie is: Engagement programs can only send emails; they cannot include other types of interactions or activities (although I haven't used it this way yet!!) 

Best,

Courtney 

[KarinaVidal]

Thanks a lot, @laurenmccormack , you have been amazing! I appreciate you jumping in to provide study resources and answering our questions. Thanks for being a rock star!  🦄💜

[KarinaVidal]

I believe the quiz answer is:

Which company stakeholders should be included in the process when creating a lead scoring model?

a. Sales
b. Marketing
c. Product Management
d. Chief Executive Officer
e. Board of Directors
f. Finance

I believe that the lie is:

• Engagement programs can only send emails; they cannot include other types of interactions or activities.

We can add a program to replace emails in the streams that can add a Person into a different Program. Once the program is added as content in the suture stream, a Marketo User can send the email internally via the program's batch campaign rather than the nurture stream or use a campaign (batch) to trigger other activities via its flow steps. 

• Engagement programs in Marketo are designed to nurture leads over time with automated, targeted content.
  
  • This is a benefit of an Engagement Program - its stream feature - over others. 
• You can use Engagement programs to measure the success of your content by tracking engagement metrics like email opens and clicks.
  • This seems correct because a Marketo user can set up an email report to view engagement. They can also view the engagement reports built into the Engagement program, which includes the Dashboard data snapshots of email Highest Engagement, Summary, Unsubscribe, and Exhaustion.