Does Marketo actually track what sites leads visit outside of cookie'd pages?

[Anonymous]

I recently started at a new company and inherited a beast of a Marketo instance. Still making my through the hundreds of trigger campaigns that are running for scoring, processing, etc. (!!!)  One of the currently running trigger campaigns is called "Searched for Competitor". I'm assuming the goal is to notify sales (with an Interesting Moment) when a lead searches for one of our competitors.  But how does Marketo even know this? And the trigger for this campaign is: "Visits Web Page" is any with Query String containing any of our competitor's names. Huh?? And the interesting moment should provide the query string value but the last few are coming back empty so not even how/why it's being triggered! I'm tempted to just turn it off but do understand the value of this info if it's accurate. Could someone explain/troubleshoot this with me?  Thanks.

[Jep_Castelein2]

in the unlikely event that someone searches Google for a competitor's name and lands on your website, this campaign will run. My gut tells me that there are 0 members for this campaign. If yes, you can safely de-activate this campaign. 

[Grant_Booth]

I'd say either Jep is right, or whoever set it up has no idea what they're doing.
If someone clicks on a paid ad link to your website after searching a competitor's name, it should be included in the query string.

[Jep_Castelein2]

Good point Grant. If you run PPC ads when people search for your competitor's brand names, then you could see some members in this campaign. 

[Anonymous]

Well this campaign has apparently been running since sometime in 2012. And there are 1400+ members in the campaign. But the query string appears to be blank in the internesting moment so I'm thoroughly confused. I think I may just turn it off unless I can figure out a way to show that it works properly.  On to the next challenge...

[Anonymous]

Jep and Grant - are you able to look at my instance and see the members that have run through this campaign?

[Jep_Castelein2]

Alisa, please open a support ticket and someone will take a look at it. 

Best, 
Jep

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys!