Anyone pushing KISSMetrics data into Marketo?

[Anonymous]

Hi all, 

We have just gotten started with KISSMetrics and my colleague who is leading that project has set up a lot of really interesting events in KM that are specific to our business (e.g., interacting with elements of our web app that do not generate a new webpage view). It would be really difficult to recreate these events in Marketo without more custom coding, which would be duplicative. 

Has anyone had any experience with pushing events from KISSMetrics to Marketo? 

I am thinking of pushing these events as "virtual pageviews" or something similar so that we could use this intelligence to trigger campaigns in Marketo. 

Any insight from anyone combining these two platforms would be great!

[Anonymous]

Hey Justin,

Did you get anywhere with this? Researching this now. 

[Anonymous]

Hey Alexander, 

No luck unfortunately, although I have not taken it very far since my original post.  

Currently we have a few different ways of exposing these events into Marketo although they all have their disadvantages and all do an end-run around KissMetrics: 

1) We pull all KissMetrics data into our data warehouse and can then send certain data back into Salesforce using a tool like Pentaho (e.g., populate a custom field in Salesforce). Cons -- there is a 30 minute lag for us so not real time and it requires a BI specialist to set up and maintain 🙂 

2) We recreate the Kissmetrics events using the Marketo SOAP API. My current method is to use the RequestCampaign API call which triggers an Event Controller campaign in Marketo. This master campaign can then request any other campaign I want it to. This works well for sigifnificant recurring events (e.g, somebody starts hiring for a new job in our app). 

It is also possible to push events as virtual pageviews although we haven't done this yet. Vidyard is one integrated app that does this though (they push video activity as page views) so I have seen it is quite possible. 

Cons -- uses up dev cycles. 100% custom code to maintain so really makes KissMetrics irrelevant 🙂 

If you find any other methods please do let me know!

[Anonymous]

Hey Justin,

I'm currently working on an integration between our analytics platform and Marketo. I'm not too familiar with Marketo though, so I'm in the research phase of things.

Currently, we use our analytics platform to handle all the behavioral intelligence and then can add the visitor to a Marketo List.  Would this solve your use case, or is there a bigger reason why you need to push events to Marketo?  

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hey Billy, 

The challenge for us is there are some web behaviours that Marketo can't pick up on (or can't easily pick up on without code). 

Examples -- partial form fill outs, interacting with node.js or Ajax elements (where the URL does not refresh), clicks on buttons in certain modal windows, and the list goes on. 

We use KissMetrics to track these things, and we want to send these events into the Marketo activity log. Ideally as "virtual pageviews" that mimic web page visits but with details in the page name so we could use in triggers/filters etc. 

Just adding to a Marketo list feels a bit unwieldy to me, in part becuase of having to maintain lots of lists and also because list membership is binary (member or not member) whereas these events could repeat multiple times.