can someone explain how "campaign is requested" works?

[Anonymous]

to be specific, I'm seeing the following

"Campaign is Requested = Marketo Flow Action" < Trigger

what exactly does this mean? I tried looking in the product doc but not getting a clear cut answer.

and additionally, how does the "Request Campaign" (Flow) work?

Thanks!

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Malik,

Campaign is requested and Request Campaign are basically paired flow>trigger steps.

A really good use case for them tends to be situations where you require a campaign to be triggered for a specific functionality to work, but the campaign would otherwise be a batch campaign - good example being triggering an SMS send via webhook (as webhooks require a trigger to work and don't work on batch campaigns).

So, you have Smart Campaign A which has your audience criteria in the smart list, then request campaign in the flow step, referring to Smart Campaign B, which has the campaign is requested trigger, and the web hook call in the flow step.

Note - you have to have an active smart campaign with the campaign is requested trigger in order to see any options in the request campaign flow step - so you'd have to activate Campaign B and then batch run Campaign A in that order.

Hope that helps explain

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

You can also think of a requested campaign as a sub-routine to the main smart campaign.  The important point to realize though is the requested campaign runs in parallel with any additional flow steps contained in the parent campaign (it doesn't run like a true sub-routine that first completes before any additional logic/flow steps are run in the parent campaign).  So you may need to get creative with wait steps if you want the requested campaign to finish running before continuing on with the flow steps in the parent campaign.

Another good use-case for requested campaigns is for repeatable logic/steps that many campaigns can refer to - rather than build the same logic within each smart campaign that needs it.  We have a single "sync to CRM" smart campaign that has all of the required logic - in our case, assign leads to country marketers based on country value.  And every smart campaign in our lead lifecycle program that would otherwise have these sync rules as additional flow steps within the campaign - now can simply request this central smart campaign whenever needed.

Here's the central "Sync Lead to CRM" smart campaign:

And one of the many smart campaigns that requests it as part of the overall flow:

As you you can see, this is a very scalable approach and makes maintaining the lead owners very easy since it's only done once.

[Grace_Brebner3]

This is a great example of using them to scale efficiently

Side note - are you seeing any load/speed impacts through this method? I've not personally experienced it but have anecdotally heard that request campaigns at scale can be a little slow - I believe overall in the system they get prioritised last?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Even though requested campaigns are executed at a lower priority, we haven’t noticed any negative impact in our environment.

[Grace_Brebner3]

Good to know, thanks Dan.

[Veronica_Holme4]

I 100% with certainty have seen Request Campaign triggers abused to such a degree that it impacts the ability for Marketo to function. By that I mean hundreds of them operating all the time. If you use them sensibly and within reason they're a really effective tool to manage workflows.

I met someone during the course of my consulting career who was pretty much using Request Campaign in every campaign they built (HUNDREDS of them), which resulted in a trigger backlog that took days to clear once we switched them all off.

Not mentioning names, but someone who used to be in Marketo Product Management once told me that PMs hate it when people use them to get around the webhook limitation for performance reasons. Heh.

[Grace_Brebner3]

Yiiiiiiiikes. I feel like a mutual friend of ours might be where I got this nugget of knowledge about them having issues at large scale good to know its mostly when you're being irresponsible with them...