🗣️ [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

[gergana]

With your US timezone, you beat me in timing 🙂 

I agree with @KarinaVidal. The answer to the question is a. Sales and b. Marketing

Regarding the 2 truths and a lie, I believe the lie is 'Engagement programs can only send emails; they cannot include other types of interactions or activities.' As Karina mentioned, we can use programs instead of just emails, which gives us significant flexibility and makes Engagement Programs a very powerful feature. EPs are probably my favorite Marketo feature 🙂 The streams, the transition rules, the possibility to use programs that give you flexibility and more power in managing complex situations, the ability to seamlessly change the order of the content even if the engagement program is up and running... just wow! Based on my experience, no other marketing automation tool has such a powerful and flexible feature.

Thank you @laurenmccormack for all the tips and content shared. Your guidance has been invaluable!

Following your example, I'd love to connect with you all and continue our marketing automation discussions also on LinkedIn —feel free to add me on LinkedIn and let's keep in touch!

[laurenmccormack]

Let's keep going with reporting as a theme for our quiz question today! 🙂

Which Marketo report provides insights into the performance of a series of automated emails designed to nurture leads over time?

A) Campaign Activity Report
B) Engagement Stream Performance Report
C) People Performance Report
D) Web Page Activity Report

Also, for extra credit, feel free to post your OWN challenge to your peers this week! I'd like it to be Marketo 2 truths and a lie. So tell us two true things and one false one, and we'll guess the false one. Here's mine for the week:

• The Campaign Email Performance Report provides data on the open and click-through rates of emails sent through a specific campaign.
• The People by Revenue Stage Report helps track the progression of leads through different stages of the revenue cycle.
• The Web Page Activity Report tracks the performance of landing pages, including conversion rates and form submissions.

Happy studying, y'all! 💜

[tcthanawan]

Hi Lauren,

The answer to the quiz is B, Engagement Stream Performance Report, which shows the nurture email performance. 

The answer to your two truths and one lie is the Web page activity. It does not provide the number of form submissions and conversions, you can see the who and number of views. 

@gergana  - as for the answer for your 2 truths and 1 lie, I would select numbers 2 - 2. To identify who has unsubscribed in the last 7 days, you need to create a People by Status Report. As there are multiple ways to pull this - for our company, we used filled-out form reports; alternatively, we pulled a smart list with opt-out status. Interesting in hearing how you guys pull the report. 

@KarinaVidal  - I think the 2 truths are number 2 and 3. As for API call, I believe it is per leads amount, however I am unsure. Looking forwards to hear the exact amount. 

Loving these challenges! 

[KarinaVidal]

Hi @tcthanawan @berrygirl044 @gergana  

So the lie is:

1. Programs added to an Archive Folder get automatically deactivated and, by default, disappear from the Search Within Tree Bar in Marketing Activities.

I bolded the lie. But as @gergana mentioned, the campaigns within and any active landing page will remain the same status (active or deactivated) before they were moved to an Archive Folder. So, you'll want to ensure that all campaigns are deactivated, forms are removed or unapproved, and Landing pages are deactivated and redirected to your home page or an alternative page. 

As for the truths:

1. A Batch campaign counts as one API Call because it can perform updates to all specified persons at once.

1. I was looking for documentation to link out for this, but API documentations in Marketo are focused on actual API calls rather than the API count. The closest things I found to explain this is a YouTube video by Marketo Champ Corey and the SFDC API call breakdown. This was knowledge I got from MKTO support in 2019 in an attempt to decrease our API calls without increasing the MKTO starter pack of 50k API calls. So, I can see the confusion in considering this one a lie since there isn't much documentation specifying the actual call counts. But, what does remain true is that triggers are individual API calls in compassion to batch campaigns since triggers process Persons, Data, and Syncs individually per execution in comparison to a batch. 
   1.  

3. To schedule a nurture cast during the recipient's time zone, a Marketo users must schedule the cadence at least 25 hours in the future. 

1. This is true because the time requirement to schedule is required for nurture programs, or it blocks you from scheduling. Email Send programs work differently; email Send programs will allow you to schedule the email to be sent at the recipient's time zone, assuming that the specified local time has not occurred. So, if an email set during the systems time 11a.m PT is set to launch at noon, the recipient time zone, a person in the Eastern Time Zone (i.e., NYC, DC, GA, etc...) will not receive the email at all since their 11 am ET has already occurred. 

•  

[gergana]

Hi all,

@berrygirl044 , @KarinaVidal and @tcthanawan regarding my “2 truths and a lie”, you are all right. The answer is that the 2nd one is a lie.

As you mentioned in the People by Status report, we can see the "stage" based on the person's status and track how people are moving through the process. The report provides a snapshot of the person statuses per month. While it is possible to create a stage called "unsubscribe," I personally think it's not a good idea. The stages of a person should, in my opinion, be related to business stages (like "known," "lead," "prospect," "inquiry," "opportunity opened," "customer," "recycled/renurturing," etc.). Every business can define the stages that best fit its needs.

@tcthanawan In my company, we manage different brands within the same Marketo instance, so we are not using the standard Unsubscribe field. Instead, we have created custom fields for each brand's unsubscribe. Similar to your approach, we use smart lists (form filled out or directly “unsubscribe brand x” = true).

The problem with these types of smart lists is that we cannot directly report on unsubscriptions from a specific campaign. Additionally, the standard Email Performance report is not helpful, as the data related to unsubscribes is inaccurate due to our custom unsubscribe fields.

I am considering creating another custom field to use as a hidden field in the unsubscribe form. The idea is to tokenize it and pass the value of the email from which the person is unsubscribing. This is still just an idea, and I have not yet tried it, so I am not sure if it is feasible.

Do you think this could be a good solution? Do you encounter the same reporting issues as we do?

@berrygirl044, regarding your "2 truths and a lie," I think the lie is #3: "Marketo's predictive content feature automatically generates new content ideas based on trending topics in the industry." It would be great if it were true, though! 😊

@KarinaVidal, regarding your "2 truths and 1 lie," I believe your lie is #2: "Programs added to an Archive Folder get automatically deactivated and, by default, disappear from the Search Within Tree Bar in Marketing Activities." When you archive a folder, the programs and relative smart campaigns inside it won’t get deactivated automatically. If we want them deactivated, we must do it manually. However, the part about disappearing from the Search Within Tree Bar in Marketing is true.

As for the API part, unfortunately, I don't have any experience with APIs and will need to study a lot 😊 Any possible "study assets" (besides Marketo’s documentation), suggestions, or experiences you would like to share are welcome 😊

Can you also please explain why "A Batch campaign is considered a single API call since it updates all specified individuals simultaneously" is true (or false if I am mistaken)?

@laurenmccormack, as I mentioned before, I really like this challenge. It is very stimulating, encourages conversation, and promotes discussion. Let's keep doing it! 😊

[KarinaVidal]

Here goes my Two Truths and a Lie (muahahaha *in Bowser's voice):

1. A Batch campaign counts as one API Call because it can perform updates to all specified persons at once.
2. Programs added to an Archive Folder get automatically deactivated and, by default, disappear from the Search Within Tree Bar in Marketing Activities.
3. To schedule a nurture cast during the recipient's time zone, a Marketo users must schedule the cadence at least 25 hours in the future. 

Happy learning friends! 😊

[KarinaVidal]

I believe the answer for today's quiz is:

B) Engagement Stream Performance Report

As for the two truths and a lie, I believe it is:

• The Web Page Activity Report tracks the performance of landing pages, including conversion rates and form submissions.

From my understanding, the WPA report shows more activities, such as the webpage referrer and entrance/LP, than actual conversions. 

[gergana]

Hi @laurenmccormack  thank you for the answer about the reports in the exam.

Regarding the today's question the answer is B) Engagement Stream Performance Report
This report specifically tracks how recipients interact with emails within an engagement program streams. It measures metrics such as how effective our content is (engagement score), email open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes, and other engagement metrics that help evaluate the effectiveness of the nurturing emails.

Regarding your 2 truths and 1 lie, I believe the lie is:

"The Web Page Activity Report tracks the performance of landing pages, including conversion rates and form submissions."

Actually, the Web Page Activity Report provides insights into our website's performance, showing visitor details such as who is visiting, how many pages is viewing, the entry page, date of first visit and date of last visit etc. It can indicate us data about known and anonymous visitors.

Staying on the topic of reports, here are my 2 truths and 1 lie:

1. The Email Link Performance report reveals the # of clicks and # of visitors to links within a specific email.
2. To identify who has unsubscribed in the last 7 days, you need to create a People by Status Report.
3. The Engagement Dashboard can help us understand how our content is perfoming over time in our nurturing program.

P.S. I think this is a great idea; let's continue with other challenges like this!:)

[KarinaVidal]

This one is tough for me. I believe that this is a lie:

2. To identify who has unsubscribed in the last 7 days, you need to create a People by Status Report.

The reason is that the status for this report is usually based on the org's revenue cycle status from the Person Status field. However, depending on the business use case, an Unsubscribe (engagement status) can be a value. So, there's flexibility to edit it based on what's best for the org and business process. 

These seem like truths:

1. The Email Link Performance report reveals the # of clicks and # of visitors to links within a specific email.

This is true because we can see the number of overall clicks and the total number of unique people per link within the email. We cannot drill down to see the number of clicks an individual has made, nor can we get a true number of unique people in the total since it compiles each person per link. Therefore, one person can make three clicks, but the total number will consider that person multiple times, making it appear as three people rather than one.

3. The Engagement Dashboard can help us understand how our content is perfoming over time in our nurturing program.

This seems true as well because, within the nurture program, we can visually see engagement data such as Summary, Exhausted, Program Status, and Highest Engagement scores per email in its streams. 

@gergana , I eagerly await your response and the verdict of my choice! 

[berrygirl044]

Hi! 

B) Engagement Stream Performance Report

I think your lie is "The Web Page Activity Report tracks the performance of landing pages, including conversion rates and form submissions."

I'm still thinking on my 2 truths and a lie! 

[berrygirl044]

I highlighted the lies! 

@gergana 

1. The Email Link Performance report reveals the # of clicks and # of visitors to links within a specific email.
2. To identify who has unsubscribed in the last 7 days, you need to create a People by Status Report.
3. The Engagement Dashboard can help us understand how our content is perfoming over time in our nurturing program.

I would create a smart list to see who unsubscribed in the past 7 days. 

@KarinaVidal 

1. A Batch campaign counts as one API Call because it can perform updates to all specified persons at once.

2. Programs added to an Archive Folder get automatically deactivated and, by default, disappear from the Search Within Tree Bar in Marketing Activities.

3. To schedule a nurture cast during the recipient's time zone, a Marketo users must schedule the cadence at least 25 hours in the future. 

I think number one is a lie and a similar actual API call would be a bulk extract API call. 

Here's my 2 truths and a lie! 

• Marketo's predictive content uses machine learning algorithms to personalize content recommendations based on user behavior and engagement data.
• Marketo's predictive content helps marketers improve conversion rates by delivering the right content to the right person at the right time.
• Marketo's predictive content feature automatically generates new content ideas based on trending topics in the industry.

[KarinaVidal]

@berrygirl044 , I believe the lie is:

• Marketo's predictive content feature automatically generates new content ideas based on trending topics in the industry.

I agree with @gergana , I think it would be fantastic for predictive content to generate new content. Perhaps with the evolution of AI, we may soon get a feature or a MKTO product to do precisely that 😁

[tcthanawan]

The answer is B, nurture stream.

[KarinaVidal]

Thanks for your input, @laurenmccormack!

Random fact: last year, I discovered that Recaptcha only knows if we are not robots based on our cookie history. That is a way for the forms/sites to know when to have it appear or bypass the requirement on the next visit. 

The study guide is going very well for me. I'm learning small details I didn't know, such as how long Marketo retains information. Something like a data retention policy may seem minute, but it is super valuable when retroacting programs, values, program memberships, or auditing. 

As for today's answer, I believe it's:

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

The stream's ability to set a cast and cadence, move users to other streams within the program, and add unique programs/emails are the distinctive components of this specific type compared to others.

Question:
You mentioned Email Deliverability as a feature. Is this a tool we can edit to optimize email sends, or is it related to the Email Engagement Report, where we can see deliverability and engagement stats?

[gergana]

I agree with @KarinaVidal regarding the question of the week. The answer is B) Nurture Streams
Personally, I prefer Marketo's Engagement Programs over the "visual" journeys offered by other marketing automation tools as the Engagement Programs provide extensive flexibility with nurture streams and allow for the inclusion of smart campaigns instead of just simple emails, enabling more complex logic when needed.

Even though the Engagement Programs are my favorite, I find it very challenging to explain their logic to new team members. Most people new to Marketo are accustomed to the visual representation of a journey of other MA tools.

Regarding the Email Deliverability, if you meen the Deliberability Tools "add-on" it's a very interesting feature. Please note that this is a paid add-on (I think for all the Marketo packages). Here is some documentation.

The Email Deliverability tool in Marketo offers real-time tracking of email delivery and inbox placement, providing insights into email performance and deliverability issues. It also includes features for spam diagnostics and reputation monitoring, helping to optimize email campaigns and ensure they reach the intended audience. To utilize it, you have to download a "seed list" from the tool and import it into your Marketo instance. Include this seed list in your email campaigns, and you'll gain access to valuable deliverability data.

Additionally, it has a feature that allows you to create email previews, which is very useful when creating a new email template. This feature lets you test the email with the majority of email clients and on desktop vs. mobile, similar to Litmus.

[KarinaVidal]

@gergana , wow, this is the first time I've heard of that feature! I definitely need to take some time to read up on this add-on. So far, what I've seen and read on the link you've shared is amazing; I can't believe this hasn't been a feature highly promoted. Again, thanks for the screenshots and explanation.

Similar to you, @laurenmccormack  , I manually check for everything offered by the Deliverability feature. In addition to using online senderscore.org,  I use online tools to check and conduct QA to ensure the emails render correctly on different email platforms. 

The fact that there is a built-in feature is soooo much better. It will save so much time hopping from online tools. 

[laurenmccormack]

Marketo offers a Deliverability Package with instances these days, I believe. I am old school and like to look up and monitor my SenderScore for my IP a few times a year to be sure I'm doing well and have not hit any blocklists: https://senderscore.org/

[laurenmccormack]

Great news, y'all! Adobe is opening considerations to reward engaged aspirants with a 50% certification exam voucher. Fill out the form here for your chance to win! https://forms.office.com/r/M0QZUCbAKG.

[KarinaVidal]

Yay, life is awesome! Thanks for sharing this link @laurenmccormack! 

[gergana]

Hi everyone,

We're encountering issues with bot activities. Although we haven't purchased any lists, our target audience is B2B, which means we're seeing a lot of bot activities coming from email security systems that 'click' every link in the email and this is causing issues on report level and could also influence some operational programs that update some values/scoring etc.

To address this, we've activated the bot activity filter in the admin settings (using both the IAB list and Proximity pattern). Since enabling these filters, a significant amount of bot activity has been filtered out. We've decided to keep a log of bot activity for troubleshooting and analysis purposes.

However, I've noticed that the filter isn't perfect. Sometimes, a contact shows a sequence of 10 consecutive clicks, but not all of these clicks are marked as bot activity (even though the timestamps are the same for all actions). While we can't see the exact timestamps (till the second), it's clear that this is bot activity, especially when there's an open email an hour later with real clicks following it.

Another issue we're seeing is with the Email Performance Report, particularly for newsletters with many links. Even when we apply a filter in the smart list (for "Clicked link in the respective email" with the constraint "Is bot activity" = True), the report still doesn't provide accurate numbers:

For example:

• Email link performance report with a smart list filter set on "clicked link in email (Email1)" and a constraint "Is bot activity" = False -> Link 1: 616 people & 1.311 clicks
• Email link performance report with no filter in the smart list -> Link 1: 634 people & 1.333 clicks
• Smart list with "clicked link in email (Email1)", constraint "Link" is = Link 1, constraint "Is bot activity" = False: 431 people
• Smart list with "clicked link in email (Email1)", constraint "Link" is = Link 1, constraint "Is bot activity" = True: 235 people

The sum of the two smart lists doesn't match the 634 people in the report, as there are 32 contacts that are present in both smart lists.

This is very confusing because we can't rely on the email performance report to provide accurate numbers for email link performance. If we need to report on the real clicks for each link in the email, we have to create smart lists for each link individually.

If I understood well, in the case of Email Link performance, when we apply the mentioned filter in the smart list, the logic seems to be as follows: from all the people who have clicked on the email, consider only those who have at least one non-bot activity, then display this in the report. However, as noted, many people have activities that are sometimes detected by the filter as bot activity and sometimes not. This inconsistency is why we see almost no difference in the email performance report, regardless of whether we include the bot activity filter or not. (I am not sure I have explained myself well :))

Has anyone else experienced similar issues? Do you have any suggestions?

[tcthanawan]

Hi Gergana, 

It sounds like we are both experiencing the same issue in the B2B space, although we did not add the "Is bot activity" constraint to our smart list and did not keep the bot log. 

Similar to you, we found that the email performance report did not provide an accurate number as it included bot activity. So, we are using the smart campaign to help us pull the list of people who clicked on a certain link, and on top of that, we used the Visited web page smart campaign just to ensure the click is genuine.

Please note that if you are using a trigger smart campaign like the one below, sometimes Marketo doesn't trigger through the audience even though they have visited web page activity on their Activity log. Therefore, I often pressure test with the filtered smart campaign after 1 day or 2 of sending the email. 

The visited page smart campaign includes: Visited page with "Link" and "member of Email Sent or click" smart campaign:

Our process seems pretty manual when it comes to reporting accurate email engagement. If anyone experiences a similar issue to Gergana and me, I would love to hear about it. Thank you!