Archive folders benefits, uses, pros and cons

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I am currently in the process of doing a bit of tidying up of my Marketing Activities.  A lot of what I am doing is moving things about so that navigation is easier and an option that comes up is the ability to "archive" and I can't seem to find a simple answer to what exactly "archiving" does and why you would bother to use it?  From all I can see archiving things just makes them more difficult to report on as you have to make more effort to select them.

Would be great to know if anyone has any great use cases, reasons for or against archiving and maybe hidden benefits I am not seeing.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Simon Allen​ FYI. I moved your post to Products and Support​

It's a very good product related question and wanted to give it more visibility!

[Josh_Hill13]

Archiving is great. Is it not in docs.marketo.com??

I wrote a post about it: Archiving Assets in MarketoMarketing Rockstar Guides

Key Points:

• Name it - 99. Archives so it appears at the bottom.
• anything that is archived or in an archive is no longer visible to basic search.
• Programs/campaigns will still be active.
• Reports, etc still work.
• Data is still there

If you DELETE things, you LOSE the data and reporting ability. DO NOT do that unless you are ok with losing that data forever.

[Anonymous]

Hey  Josh (or anyone really),

Question about archiving if you don't mind! I looked in your book and this particular example isn't mentioned.

Since archived emails aren't visible in search but reports work and data is still there, what happens when I try to use a "Was sent email was" and it references an archived email that I manually type (or copy and paste) in. Would it work?

Example: We had two great subject lines (SL) the last time the email was sent, but I archived this program. In my new remail program, I have new emails with the old subject lines. I want to make sure that people who got SL A in the archived program get SL B in the new program and those who got SL B in the archived program get SL A in the new program. Now it didn't give me a red squiggly whenever I copied the email name from the archived program -- it let me paste it. But like we know with archived, we can't search for it.

So since we can't search for it, but it didn't give me a red squiggly, would it have worked? I ended up unarchiving the program to be able to reference this and make sure it worked.

So since we can't search for it, but it didn't give me a red squiggly, would it have worked?

Thanks!

Sara

[Kenny_Elkington]

Referencing the email in a smart list will work as expected.  Archiving is designed to reduce clutter, the assets links for an archived program ro folder are lazy loaded, and are not included in search results giving you a faster experience.  A good rule of thumb is that if you still need to search for it, then it's not ready for archiving.

[Anonymous]

Hey Simon,

Josh Hill​ did a great job explaining why you should archive your programs. The best thing about achieving is clear up the tree and you can still report on those programs.

I thought you might be interested to check out this doc on how to organize your programs!

https://docs.marketo.com/display/DOCS/Best+Practice:+How+to+Organize+your+Programs

Happy achieving!

[Anonymous]

Hi Simon,

You can always unarchive, that is an advantage.  Here is the link on how to do it in docs: Archive and Unarchive Stream Content - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Anonymous]

Thanks all for your help.  I can see some of the benefits of archiving, but we have quite a good structure so maybe that is why I am not seeing the full benefit when I can just put things into normal folders without archiving.  I guess given we only have 6 months full use of Marketo, I might just be trying to do things a bit too soon.

[Dan_Stevens_]

To reiterate what Josh said - the fact that these specific programs/assets will no longer be visible in search AND when defining values in your smart campaigns, smart lists, and flow steps - make this valuable in itself.  If you're a global organization like us - where we have over 1,500 programs in our instance - it's absolutely critical that we hide those programs that are no longer needed/active (but still available in reporting, cloning, etc.) so that we don't present endless lists of program/asset names when building out our smart campaigns.

[Anonymous]

Can someone tell me how to unarchive a program? I can't seem to figure out how.