Best Practice - Combining operational steps where possible?

[ChristinaZuniga]

I'm redoing my entry funnel for leads (interesting moments, timing, lifecycle, etc) and I have so many operational smart campaigns running now...does anyone else consolidate these? For example if I have the same smart list for a smart campaign that scores and another that sets an interesting moment...I was advised by my consultant when I implemented not to combine them - to have them in separate places - but I'm wondering if consolidating would be helpful.

Is anyone else doing this?

I'll also take any advice anyone has on re-building the funnel with wait steps, etc. I learned a lot from the "under the hood" session at Summit!

Josh Hill​ Grégoire Michel​

[Devraj_Grewal]

Christina,

Consolidating operational smart campaigns into one smart campaign with multiple flow steps has it's benefits, but personally I like to have one operational smart campaign perform one function (ex. one smart campaign for interesting moments and one smart campaign for scoring).

This separation into multiple operational smart campaigns allows:

- in the case of an error, to narrow down what caused the error

- the use of the "member of smart campaign" filter more precisely if you know the operational smart campaign only performs a single function

- organize your instance

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

+1

Depends a bit here on what the campaign is doing.

• Scoring - I now always combine IMs with Scoring because they are often the same triggers. Saves alot of overhead.
• Data Processing - depends, but one purpose per campaign is ideal
• Daisy Chaining with Campaign Request triggers can help in some areas, but these campaigns receive somewhat lower priority.
• Wait Steps - in the lead funnel this is used to handle SFDC catchup or to use daisy chaining or hold leads until other processing catches up. I'd be careful because anything over 5 minute wait step drops the priority of that campaign when it reaches that Wait Step.

This is why it is a good idea to draw it all on a board and type it out before building.

[ChristinaZuniga]

Thanks Josh Hill! I'm working on white boarding everything out now, but I wish there were a checklist out there that shows each step you should consider. I'm really nervous about missing an area and having that come back to bite me later!

[Anonymous]

Josh Hill wrote:

Depends a bit here on what the campaign is doing.

• Daisy Chaining with Campaign Request triggers can help in some areas, but these campaigns receive somewhat lower priority.
• Wait Steps - in the lead funnel this is used to handle SFDC catchup or to use daisy chaining or hold leads until other processing catches up. I'd be careful because anything over 5 minute wait step drops the priority of that campaign when it reaches that Wait Step.

Just to second Josh's point, chaining Campaign Request triggers is the "Straight Through Processing" example I gave in the session.  We're discussing internally whether we want an "inherit priority" flag on those, but since we're in the middle of the Campaign V2 work, I don't want to distract the teams too much right now.

On Wait Steps, Josh is correct - that was the point of the Pop Quiz, which was to bring the five minute behavior to everyone's attention.  Someone asked me what would happen if you put two 5-minute wait steps in.  I asked the engineer, and he said the Campaign would wait five minutes, then re-enter the queue at the original priority (not Low).  But it will be treated as a new queue entry, so if there's an hour backlog of high-priority items, it will have to wait its turn before resuming.  Then it will wait five more minutes, then re-enter the queue again.  So if there's a burst of activities and a jump in backlogs, it can introduce some latency, but not as much as a ten-minute wait step, which would drop the priority to Low.

Hope that didn't confuse things too much.