Administration is the key(bunch)

[Vikram_Ramesh]

Through this post I intend to shout out to all admins in the community (and elsewhere). Admin is really like the key-bunch which could unlock/lock and maintain all the goodies Marketo has to offer.

Like every other component, once in a while we do need provide healing touches to the segments which hasn't been working so well. Also, the ones that are working well could use a performance boost. So, here's what I'd want to know from you:

1. What according to you is the single most disliked feature of admin?
2. What is the most used functionality of admin for you?
3. Are there any commonly used workarounds which you'd like admin to cater for?
4. If we were to provide an export feature of configurations, what details would you like in that "data take-out"?

Any thoughts/comments/feedback/criticism (positive or negative) revolving around Admin are greatly welcomed. Please feel free to reach out to me to discuss some of the ideas you may have. 

Looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks,

Vikram R

email: Vikram.ramesh@adobe.com

phone: +91 988 607 4356

[Amy_Goldfine]

Meg makes a good point - I can't really tell how user permissions are going to affect a user until I change something and they tell me that they don't have access to something they need to access!

[TJ_Perrin]

Hi Vikram, 

I recently had a customer research call with Marketo and brought up a request for a feature that could be added to the admin area. I think we need an instance analyzer which can provide a summary with key stats all in one place. It would be something targeted towards admins, or superusers, who inherit an instance when joining a company, but also useful for those managing it over time. Some ideas for what this could include....

1) A quick overview of the total # of contacts in the database which provides splits by marketable/unmarketable, country/region, SFDC lead/contact, customized segments, and customizable for other existing fields/tags in the database. It would also be helpful to see dormant vs engaged contacts for each region (i.e. how many have activity in the last 3/6/12 months vs those who are not active). 

2) An overview of the most active internal users.

3) A way to see key average email performance stats for the whole account (open rate, click rate, click to open rate, hard bounce, soft bounce, unsubscribe rate), and the ability to segment these averages by country or region. 

4) Similar to above, but for landing pages...what are the most viewed LPs, what is the average conversion rate for forms (with option to create an average by selecting specific LPs to crunch data on). 

5) Communication limits / API limit. 

6) Other useful macro level stats to get users up to speed. 

[Josh_Hill13]

You can do a lot of this already. But it's not on a single screen.

[Jay_Jiang]

Need more metadata for individual fields, created date, created by etc...

[SanfordWhiteman]

Webhooks configurations should use, like all code- and code-like text, a monospace font that preserves whitespace.

It's impossible to read webhook definitions that use JavaScript (or JSON objects beyond a couple of properties)... I have to use a browser plugin (UserStyles) to alter the CSS for that page

[Vikram_Ramesh]

I suppose that you're referring to the way the URL and the Payload information being displayed when we select a Webhook. 

Please correct me if I have understood it wrongly. 

Thanks, 

Vikram R

[SanfordWhiteman]

The way it is displayed, and the way it is entered.

[Amy_Goldfine]

I very much appreciate all the controls in Admin! A couple issues:

Audit trail is really an unfriendly UI. It's very clunky, it's hard to pick from the dropdowns, and it's often hard to decipher what actually changed.

My #1 issue is that Field details can only be seen by Admins! I have plenty of people doing building (consultants, email marketers) who occasionally want to look at fields to see what SFDC fields they're synced to, what type they are, where they're used, etc., but they can't because it's only available to Admins! It's also frustrating that "field mapping" tab doesn't update after initial integration. Also agree with above on renaming and deleting fields.

I would love for there to be a real-time Notification if an API connection breaks in LaunchPoint. I make it a point to check Launchpoint every day because there is one particular connection (GoToWebinar) that has been unstable, and I only find out when there is a flood of registration errors.

I am happy to get on a call to do a deep dive with you to discuss more!

[Grant_Booth]

I made a special role that only includes Field Management and gave it to a couple of users, with very specific instructions not to edit anything. But View Field Management v. Edit Field Management permission would be nice to have.

[Vikram_Ramesh]

That's a good workaround.

Ideally though, the filters should be easy to use for Audit trail. 
Although slightly tedious to implement, editing Field Management/Mapping is really good to have. 

Regards,

Vikram R

[Josh_Hill13]

Audit is very hard to use and doesn't always record things you'd expect.

Field Management with Read Only or even to show more info on the Filters in a Smart list would be helpful to many people.

[Meg_Stout]

Seconding the audit trail issues. We use the audit trail frequently for troubleshooting and are very glad to have it, but the filters are buggy and don't always work as expected. 

[Vikram_Ramesh]

Thanks a ton Amy, for explaining your concerns with such clarity

On the Audit Trail, I need to do some homework. It'd involve some of our UX engineers to help me with some designs. In the meantime, I would like to know more if you have some pointers. 

On sharing the Field Mapping information, I think we could come up with something where information could be shared securely with people on a need-to-know basis. 
On LaunchPoint, I need more details on the type of notification that you'd like to receive. And also, is GoToWebinar the only service that breaks frequently or other ones too?

I am eager to discuss more on these topics. Please let me know when is the best time and means to reach out to you. 

Really appreciate your effort in collating your concerns!

Regards,

Vikram R

[Amy_Goldfine]

Hi Vikram,

Audit Trail: It's hard to articulate the frustrations with Audit Trail. I recommend logging into an instance's Audit Trail and try to pull some reports. I don't think it needs a complete design overhaul, probably just fixing some bugs in the way picklists are displayed and how it scales/resizes/etc.

Launchpoint: GoToWebinar is the only one that breaks frequently, but when it does, it's a disaster. However I don't believe there is a notification for service expirations (e.g. LinkedIn Lead Gen needs to be authenticated after a year), which would be very helpful. 

I will "follow" you, follow me back and I can give you my email address to schedule a meeting.

Thanks,

Amy

[Grant_Booth]

Thank you for asking this!

1. Salesforce integration is the section I dislike the most. You can edit some basic sync options, and see a timestamp of the last sync and whether or not it's in progress, but it gives very little other visibility, and that makes admin'ing the integration difficult. Would be great if some of the information (object schemas, field visibility and field types, sync logs) were available to admin users through non-secret and supported methods. It would be great to see a log of the sync cycle - how many records of a given object synced to and from Salesforce, how many were new, updated, a count of the how many records are pending sync for each object. An error log too please! FYI - I used to work in Marketo Support and I know that all of this information is already available to them, and simply needs some work to make it presentable and supportable for users. In my opinion, it would also deflect a lot of their cases related to the Salesforce integration.
It would also be fantastic to have a "Field Mapping" tab where we can change the field mapping between Marketo and Salesforce on our own without having to go through Support. Additionally, it would be great if fields did not automatically sync down to Marketo simply because the sync user can see them - if the fields simply became available for sync in this hypothetical "Field Mapping" tab, it would help us tremendously with keeping our fields clean, giving us control rather than being at the mercy of our SFDC admins remembering to follow processes around permissions.

2. Field Management is the most used. For an agile team, there is constant change coming downstream from Salesforce. We have to adapt quickly to process changes in CRM by making sure new fields are synced properly and finding where old fields are in use to make sure there are no dependent processes. It would be really nice if we could (1) delete old fields rather than hiding them, (2) relabel fields even though they are in use. Our instance is 10 years old, and we have an enormous list of hidden fields.
Also, when removing a field from assets, we find the field in Field Management and look at the Used By list - but the assets there aren't clickable links, which makes it even more painful trying to remove references to the field.

3. I think I covered this in #1 and #2
4. I'm not sure how I would apply an export feature of admin configurations. If other people have use cases for that I'd be curious.

[Josh_Hill13]

try 

SFDC Sync Support Tools for Marketo

https://app-abc.marketo.com/supportTools/index

[pod-name.marketo.com/supportTools/index]

to see your current queue stats. You can also ask support for more info if you are experiencing huge delays.

We timestamp Marketo Entry and SFDF Created to see how long it takes.

[Grant_Booth]

I use those all the time! But it's a little bit of a secret that those tools exist, and I suspect Marketo would want to make them a little more user-friendly before advertising them very much

[Grant_Booth]

Another function that could really use some cleanup/improvement is Webhooks. Some nice-to-haves:

1. When I save changes to a webhook, it reloads the first webhook in the list (they're in alphabetical order) rather than the webhook I was working on. This has caused me to accidentally overwrite that webhook by mistake.
2. Drafts and version control. When #1 (see above) happens, I can't just click a button to undo the mistake. Unless I had saved attributes of the webhook somewhere else (in a text file or something), I would have to rebuild it. It makes for a huge pain.
3. For larger companies, I can only assume they end up with a lot of webhooks. It would be nice to be able to create a folder structure.

[Maria_Karlsson1]

I agree with this comment as same thing almost happened to me a few times, we have quite a few webhooks and some names very similar so you don't always realise it loads the top webhook after saving.

[Vikram_Ramesh]

Thank you so much Grant

Those are some excellent points that you've mentioned. I can see that your support days have served you well in getting a good hands-on to Admin, and Marketo in general.

On Salesforce Integration, I can totally relate to what you've mentioned. Displaying more details on the sync - last sync timestamp, in-progress percentage and also sync (error/success) logs would indeed add value to our customers. On the Field Mapping, definitely there's some scope for enhancements, providing some options to manually map fields and to control sync manually/semi automated ways (needs more thought process from my side around this).

In Field Management, I need to dig around on permanent deletion. I feel that it's best suited for a backend process to have them cleared from the system, but then I could be wrong.

Renaming fields sounds more doable though. 

While removing fields from assets, I did find the assets clickable, which leads to detail pages. Nonetheless a seamless way of handling this, without leaving Admin could be a cooler approach, in my opinion. We could discuss more if you have some time. 

Thanks again for taking time to jot these items down. It helped me in validating my opinions. 

Cheers,

Vikram R

[Grant_Booth]

Thanks Vikram! Yes, regarding the Used By list for a field, they are clickable, but are not regular hyperlinks so we can't open them in a separate tab. If I need to adapt to a major process change, we could be talking about hundreds of assets that I need to remove the field from before I can hide the field.