Bulk Activities REST API Extract Questions

[Anonymous]

Hello,

My company wants to begin doing bulk activities extracts on a monthly cadence, beginning with one big extract on certain activities such as 'Visits web page' and 'change data value':

1. Would it be possible to specify the call to pull only those specific activities? Or would the bulk activity extract pull all activities?

2. What other lead attributes are extracted in a bulk activities extract? Would we get created date, name, email, company name, etc?

3. How do we know how much data we have stored in our Marketo instance, and how much activity data would be exported? We have ~250k leads in our database since 2011. (My developer is asking)

4. For the initial extract, if hit our daily limit of 500 MB, will the job continue to run into the next day or weeks? Would we have to create another job to finish the extract? (My developer is asking)

I'm not a developer so the documentation was not easy for me to understand, so simplified explanations will help here too.

Would appreciate it if other Marketo users shared their bulk lead and/or activities export processes.

Thanks,

Shirleen

[SanfordWhiteman]

1. Would it be possible to specify the call to pull only those specific activities? Or would the bulk activity extract pull all activities?

Yes, you select activities (this is in the docs).

2. What other lead attributes are extracted in a bulk activities extract? Would we get created date, name, email, company name, etc?

Activities doesn't include lead data except for the ID. You have to do the lead extract separately. (It follows the same pattern.)

3. How do we know how much data we have stored in our Marketo instance, and how much activity data would be exported? We have ~250k leads in our database since 2011. (My developer is asking)

You don't know until you try.  The number of leads doesn't relate to the number/volume of activities (note activities don't last forever), and if you're counting bytes, the number of leads isn't as important as the number of fields (the width of a database record) and how much data is in those fields.

4. For the initial extract, if hit our daily limit of 500 MB, will the job continue to run into the next day or weeks? Would we have to create another job to finish the extract? (My developer is asking)

You control the job parameters. The extract uses a push-poll-pull pattern: you create and start a job, check for it to be done, then download the resulting file. If, for a given set of parameters, the single extracted file would exceed the daily limit, you have to slice it up into smaller date ranges.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sanford - Thanks for your answers. They are helpful.

Can I specify the bulk activities extract to only pull activity for certain leads?

If I initially export activities, would it be fairly easy to export lead data later and associate the leads to their activities using the Lead ID?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Can I specify the bulk activities extract to only pull activity for certain leads?

For this, you could use the Activity Export, not the Extract.  But rarely is this useful unless the leads have already been added to a particular list, or if you want one lead only (you can only specify 30 individual leads by ID). I would suggest you stick with the Extract. It's far more efficient and manageable, even if you get some rows you later discard.

If I initially export activities, would it be fairly easy to export lead data later and associate the leads to their activities using the Lead ID?

Yes, with the exception that if you delete a lead entirely you won't have anything to associate with.