🗣️ [Mentor Michelle Chopin] 🌟 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, Michelle Chopin (@michellechopin) 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, Michelle:

A Marketing Automation Manager (TTEC Digital) with 4 years specific in the MarTech space and almost 20 years’ B2B marketing experience. My skill set blends marketing campaign management with operational and automation competencies for a wide understanding of how cross-channel marketing supports the entire customer lifecycle. I’m an Adobe-Marketo Certified Professional and Expert since 2021.

Aspirants mapped to @michellechopin 

1. @aschultz 
2. @Gayathri 
3. @TarunMittal_12 
4. @mfavaron 
5. @Nihal 
6. @traba5058 
7. @Akshay_Sharma1 
8. @juaneraso 
9. Sujeet Deshpande

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 Michelle, 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 Michelle 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 

[michellechopin]

Happy Start-Of-The-Week everyone 🎉

Thanks for everyone who responded to Question 1 - we learned that Workspaces and Partitions are powerful features for organizations looking to separate their marketing activities/initiatives and audience based on desired segmentations, like brand, region, or product line. As you study this further, be sure to pay additional attention to sharing, cloning, and moving assets to/between workspaces. 

This week's quiz/questions are based on Section 2: Marketing Activities/Campaign Management of the AME Business Practitioner Expert Exam Prep Guide (there is an error on the link that Jon originally posted so be sure to use the new one here until the redirect is in place; additionally you're welcome to check out my blog post: Study Guide: Adobe Marketo Engage Business Practitioner Expert Renewal). I'm including a few questions this week as this section is broad and the largest:

Q2a. You have an Google Ads program that has a Period Cost of $1,000 per quarter for 2024 (based on a standard calendar year, applied at the start of each quarter). If a lead was added to the program in February, which Period Cost will they count towards?

Q2b. What are the two ways you can perform an A/B test (subject line, body content, time/date, from address) for an email program?

Q2c. With regards to Program Member Custom Fields (PMCF), how many custom fields can the object have?

Q2d. In a Smart Campaign, how are Triggers evaluated when the Smart List Rule/Filter Logic is set to "All"?

Add your answers in response to this comment, and don't hesitate to ask questions for added clarification or learning.

Additionally, feel free to share any experience you might have with these Marketo functionalities - discussion and ideas sharing can be helpful for your fellow aspirants, especially for those that might not yet have experience with a particular element.

Looking forward to your answers and our discussion this week 😀

[aschultz671]

Hope everyone has had a good week. I'm little late to the game on this one. 

Q2a. You have an Google Ads program that has a Period Cost of $1,000 per quarter for 2024 (based on a standard calendar year, applied at the start of each quarter). If a lead was added to the program in February, which Period Cost will they count towards?

Would they count towards the period cost of Q1? I know period cost defaults to monthly, but it Google Ads is integrated correctly could you then connect it to that campaign?
That's not an integration we currently have so I might be far off the mark on this one.

Q2b. What are the two ways you can perform an A/B test (subject line, body content, time/date, from address) for an email program?

For a simple email send, setting the winner criteria to automatically select the winner or manually select the winner. Or for an ongoing nurture/trigger campaign you can put it in champion/challenger mode. I'm not as familiar with this type of test, does it run on a schedule to optimize the best email set up by the user?

Q2c. With regards to Program Member Custom Fields (PMCF), how many custom fields can the object have?

We have many of these currently, the limit is 20 PMCF that can then be utilized by any program.

Q2d. In a Smart Campaign, how are Triggers evaluated when the Smart List Rule/Filter Logic is set to "All"?

Triggers in a smart list are really considered as "any" since once any action (trigger) happens and they qualify for all the filters on the smart list, they will then qualify for the campaign.

[michellechopin]

Happy Friday and great answers @aschultz671

For each of your questions (in order):

1. Period costs are added monthly but in this example, the cost is for the entire quarter and set on the first month of the quarter (I realize I probably didn't word my question very well); in this example, because the cost is associated with January, any leads added in February will "roll backwards" to the January cost. If we add another period cost for Q2 in April, any leads added in April, May, or June will "roll backwards" to the April cost.
2. Depending on which test you perform, the process is a little different:
   • Using the Control Panel, you select the test sample size (% of your smart list/audience) and the test time frame (Marketo requires a minimum of 4 hours - if you try to select less time than that, it will reset the time vs giving you an alert/warning). Once the test period is over, Marketo will automatically send the winning email to the rest of your audience (default option), although you have the option to select the winner manually (you're still required to test for 4 hours minimum, even though the Test Duration information is removed from the Schedule tab.  My preference is to use the automatic option and I check on the campaign EOD or next day
      

   • The Champion/Challenger mode works in a similar way but you have to select "New Test" from the specific email you want to use, and then the options will open up that look similar to the Control Panel version. The only option we don't get here is the Date/Time testing option.

   • For the third version, where you can set up separate emails and test them manually using Random Sample in your Smart Campaign for deployment, this is always done manually - split the test in your preferred manner (I usually do 50%) and, using an Email Performance report, you can see which email performed best according to your criteria.

Hope those extra details help you out! 😃

[TarunMittal_12]

Hi @michellechopin  Thank you for posting these interesting  questions ‌‌. Please find my answers below and correct me incase I am wrong at any point. 
Q2a. You have an Google Ads program that has a Period Cost of $1,000 per quarter for 2024 (based on a standard calendar year, applied at the start of each quarter). If a lead was added to the program in February, which Period Cost will they count towards?
-They will count towards the month of January in Q1 since months with no defined period costs will roll “backwards” to the last one that was defined. 

Q2b. What are the two ways you can perform an A/B test (subject line, body content, time/date, from address) for an email program?
-The two methods that I am familiar with for doing an A/B test are
1. Add the A/B test on the email program that we use normally for one time email send programs by selecting the test type, sample size, winning criteria, Test samples and winner email scheduling date and time.

2. Champion/Challenger method: We can add this test to the email asset directly. These emails only work with trigger campaigns and engagement program streams and not work on the batch campaigns.
Also, We have to declare winner manually after checking results. The winner email cannot be declared automatically.

There's one more approach that I follow in one of the account I work for: We can create two separate email versions e.g. Email A and Email B with the criteria that we want to test and add both emails in the smart campaign Send Email flow step by adding choices and use random sample filter.
Example: Choice 1: If Random Sample is 40%, send email A
Default choice : Send Email B
Later we can declare the winner from the email performance report results.

Q2c. With regards to Program Member Custom Fields (PMCF), how many custom fields can the object have?
-The Program Member object can have up to 20 custom fields.
I usually use the Program Member Custom Fields on the registration forms of multi session events and if there's specific information related to a particular event needs to be stored e.g. Registrants dietary preferences.

Q2d. In a Smart Campaign, how are Triggers evaluated when the Smart List Rule/Filter Logic is set to "All"?
-The triggers are evaluated as "Any"(1 or 2 or 3...) logic even if we choose "All" in the smart list.

[michellechopin]

Amazing answers @TarunMittal_12 👏 You are correct on all of these!

Specifically to two of your responses:

• I will say...I asked for which two ways there are to do an A/B test and you made me realize that I completely forgot about the Champion/Challenger option 😏 - you are correct that there are three ways to test emails depending on the scenario. We do most of our email testing in the third way you mentioned - where we create separate emails for testing and manually look at the results afterwards (this works great when there are multiple emails in a campaign that each need their own test). 
• Your PCMF example is a great use of that field, not only because it allows information specific to a program to be captured, but that type of information is widely applicable so you're only using up on of your fields on it (that's the biggest challenge with PCMF - you have to get really creative in how you set them up so you don't run out

Great work! If there are questions about any of the other parts of this section that you have/come across while you study, don't hesitate to ask 😀

[Nihal]

Hi @michellechopin ,

2a. You have an Google Ads program that has a Period Cost of $1,000 per quarter for 2024 (based on a standard calendar year, applied at the start of each quarter). If a lead was added to the program in February, which Period Cost will they count towards?

- They will be counted in Q1 quarter of 2024. @michellechopin can you please share some more example on how period cost is calculated? 

2b. What are the two ways you can perform an A/B test (subject line, body content, time/date, from address) for an email program?

- We can perform A/B test on all type - Subject line, Whole email, date/time, from Address

2c. With regards to Program Member Custom Fields (PMCF), how many custom fields can the object have?

- Program member object can have up to 20 custom fields. @michellechopin can you explain about Marketo custom object.

2d. In a Smart Campaign, how are Triggers evaluated when the Smart List Rule/Filter Logic is set to "All"?

- In a smart campaign, the triggers are always evaluated as OR even if the above setting is set to ALL.

[michellechopin]

Great answers @Nihal 😀

To answer your questions/requests (in the order you wrote them):

1. Period costs refer to the money you spend in a specific month on a program, and are based entirely on your organization's spending efforts. Depending on when these period costs apply in your program(s), new contacts apply to those costs as follows (see Understanding Period Costs for visual examples and more details):
   • For months with defined period costs, contacts will count towards the month in which they were created
   • For occasions where there is a single period cost, e.g. March, contacts created before that month will "roll forwards"; contacts created after that month will "roll backwards" 
   • For occasions where period costs are defined at longer intervals or intermittently, contacts will count towards the last period defined, e.g. with period costs added in January and April, contacts added between January and March will count towards January, while those added in April and May (and beyond) will count towards April.
   • If there are no period costs defined, then this program will not be reported on
2. While you are correct in noting the different types of A/B testing available in Marketo, my question is related to how/where you can perform those tests (apologies if that wasn't clear!). I'll wait to provide an answer/update until others have submitted their answers so I don't spoil it for everyone 😉
3. A Marketo custom object is used to track metrics that are specific to your business, and they can be used as filters and triggers in Smart Campaigns - this is quite a broad topic but also specific to individual organizations, so check out the Marketo Documentation: Understanding Marketo Custom Objects if you're interested. These are different from Program Member Custom Fields, which are custom fields set up in Marketo and applied at the program level (you have to get created with them as those 20 fields apply across all your Marketo programs)

Keep up the great work 😊

[TarunMittal_12]

Hi @michellechopin and other Aspirants, Here are some details about me:
Name : Tarun Mittal
Region : India
Company : Grazitti Interactive
Title : Sr. Marketing Automation Specialist
Email : tarunmittal390@gmail.com
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarun-mittal-marketing-automation/
Feel free to connect 🙂

Nice to meet everyone. Sorry for the late introduction, I was waiting for my community profile id to be updated. Looking forward to learn more.

[michellechopin]

It's a pleasure to meet you @TarunMittal_12 😃 I'm so glad you got your profile all tidied up so you can join in!

Looking up Grazitti Interactive, I see that there used to be an office in my neck of the woods - just across from Seattle in Bellevue. What a small world! 

Hope you're getting settled into the program and feel free to ask questions or share insight/experience/knowledge that can be beneficial to the group 😊

[michellechopin]

This week's quiz/question is based on Section 1 of the AME Business Practitioner Expert Exam Prep Guide:

Q1. Define the difference between a workspace and a partition, and provide an example reason for their use.

Add your answers in response to this comment, and don't hesitate to ask questions for added clarification or learning too.

Additionally, feel free to share any experience you might have with this Marketo functionality - ideas sharing helps learning too!

Looking forward to your answers 😀

[traba5058]

Hi Michelle, a workspace hold all of the content (Design Studio & Marketing Activities) while a partition holds the data (leads). In our instance, we have a workspace & partition for each of our client-partners to manage their brands and content as well as their leads. We are also unique in that our lead number (EFCID) is the identifier on the lead record rather than the email address. Many times multiple institutions are marketing to the same prospective student, so the student has to be loaded into each partition. We are also using our own unsubscribe rather than the Marketo process for that same reason. We need prospective students to be able to unsubscribe from the specific institution rather than our Marketo instance and all institutions.

[michellechopin]

Thanks for the definition and sharing your experience, @traba5058 😀

This is super cool to learn how your organization uses workspaces and partitions to service students, and the need to use your own unsubscribe system to accommodate your use case.

Using the student ID makes so much sense as a unique identifier (email address isn't considered a unique identifier in Marketo and is only used as a deduplication tool for lead creation/update via other tools) - I imagine it works much the same way as the Lead/Person ID in Marketo (entirely unique and set up by a/the system). 

[TarunMittal_12]

Using workspaces and Partitions we can organize the marketing content and database contacts. Marketing content will be housed in workspaces, while the records will be stored in the partitions.

Workspaces are a useful for organizing and managing marketing assets such as forms, emails, landing pages, and programs.
For example It can be useful for the companies having multiple marketing teams for different regions. They can create separate workspaces for each region and each workspace has its own set of marketing assets.
Multiple users can use workspaces, and based on the roles and permissions set up in Marketo instance, each user may be able to access one or more workspaces.

Partitions are useful to manage database. Each partition will function like a separate database and each of them contain its own records which can not be mixed with other partitions.
For instance a multi region company (NAM, EUR..etc.) can create lead partitions for each region to ensure that leads from North America are only accessible to the North American team and not to the European team.

[michellechopin]

Great definition, @TarunMittal_12 😃 

This goes to show how workspaces and partitions can help an organization separate its marketing activities/initiatives and audiences based on whatever segmentation makes the most sense for them, whether it's by region, product offering, brand, etc.

[Nihal]

Workspace and Partitions.

Workspaces are to separate the marketing assets like (emails, landing pages, and programs). The best example for a workspace would be having a separate workspace for each business region (EMEA, APAC, AMER).

Partitions are used to create a separate database for one workspace or many workspace. Records in that database are not accessible to the other workspace.

@michellechopin, I have a question on the partition part. It would be great if you could share a use case or explain it.

Q - What if we have used one partition on many workspaces? How can we tackle duplicate records?

[michellechopin]

Great answer, @Nihal! Regions are a great example of a workspace use case, making it easy to keep assets simple when it comes to language, spelling, and even privacy needs.

For your example, if you're using only one partition that connects to multiple workspaces, then duplicates would be managed the same way as if you had one workspace to one partition - Marketo will use its deduplication feature where possible (note: Marketo can/will allow duplicates in some occasions - check out this awesome Community post about it: Deduplication: How It Works, and When It Doesn't). 

However, you would have to consider, based on how your workspaces are split up, what impact that has on your partition - for example, if you have one partition that is connected your EMEA, APAC, and AMER workspaces, you'd need to think about how you would segment that data or use fields to identify which region the lead belongs to so you can address them differently as needed (privacy is the big one that comes to mind here as GDPR only applies to EMEA). When workspaces are separated in distinctive ways, like this, it might be a better option to use separate partitions for each one - then you can be sure that leads are separated out the gate and not have to worry whether data is marked/stamped/segmented with specific information (while automation can help us with this, we always want to keep human/process errors in mind). When workspaces are split up based on brand, then it might make sense to have a single partition as the leads don't need to be separate as specifically. For example, before we relaunched our Marketo instance under a single brand, we managed three workspaces - one was my company, the second was company acquired at the same time, and the third was the parent company. This allowed us to access the same database for all three, and manage our messaging based on various data points like location or behavior.

[aschultz671]

Workspace is to marketing activities as partition is to database.

For example, my organization has almost 20 workspaces to help keep things organized and also limit newer marketo users from making changes to the wrong programs. Some users in my org only have access to the specific workspaces that they need. 

Partitions might be used if an org has several unique and defined groups that they are targeting and want to keep a "clean" person record.

I'm not as familiar with partitions, but my understanding is that a lead could exist in multiple partitions so they could have different info on each of their person records? 

[michellechopin]

Thanks for a great, detailed answer @aschultz671! 

There are definitely many benefits to breaking up a Marketo instance into separate workspaces and partitions - our last Marketo instance here was broken into three workspaces because my team was responsible for three brands (two acquired by the other) that we had to keep separate until we were officially under the purchasing company. You noted that your organization has 20 workspaces 😮 - is that easy or hard for you to manage? Are your workspaces organized by brand or client perhaps?

You are correct that a lead can be in multiple partitions, but it's important to remember that they are not shared across those partitions - a lead would have different Record IDs in each partition; you can "send" leads from one to another if there is a need to do so. I would assume that the information available on each lead could be different in each partition because data is uploaded/added to a partition specifically and/or leads can come in through forms that only exist in a single workspace (forms are one of the few items that cannot be shared across workspaces but can be cloned to create a new version in a new partition) - i.e. the lead could have two different names if they filled out a form or their data was uploaded as John Smith in one partition and Johnathan Smith on another. Also using different field labels on each form could generate different information from the Person too!

Having said that, one workspace can access/be connected to multiple partitions so that could potentially complicate having the same lead in multiple partitions, especially if there is a single form that the lead in its various partitions can access. Definitely something to consider in those cases!

[aschultz671]

We have them separated by teams/business units. I really only work within 6 regularly, so it's pretty simple to manage on a day-to-day basis from a practical perspective. We have a pretty consistent/hefty asset labeling method we've followed since we started using marketo to keep things tidy as well.

As far as the partitions go, I don't believe we have multiple, I think we pull from the same database for everyone, which for our use case makes sense. Especially for us, I believe there are a few examples of someone filling out a form in one workspace, but the info they input is then populated in their record so other business units can utilize that info as well. We want to have consistent data across workspaces to avoid the duplicates problem you mention with separate partitions. 

[michellechopin]

Organizing processes and workspaces like this makes so much sense, @aschultz671! I get so much satisfaction out of organizing and streamlining things - not only does it make life easier for us spending all our time in the workspace/instance, but should anyone else need to get in there, it's (ideally/hopefully) easy for them to jump right in and see how things work. 

Making your data available to other groups in a straightforward manner is always best - it prevents data from being siloed and also helps people to trust the data that you have (and as Marketing people, we know how important that data trust can be!).

[traba5058]

Hi all,

I'm a developer and work for enrollmentFUEL. We are an agency that works with the Enrollment and Marketing teams at colleges and universities across the U.S. All of the programs we run for our client-partners are on the Marketo Engage platform. We implemented the platform two years ago with about 5 our client-partners and moved all of our client-partners to the platform last year. I program the emails and landing pages and build and launch the campaigns in Marketo.

I'm in Des Moines, IA U.S.A. and also in the Central timezone.

Please feel free to add me on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/trabamcquary)! Excited to get to know you all!