Exceeding API Call Limit Following Large Email Sends

[Anonymous]

We are regularly exceeding the daily 50,000 API call limit when doing large email sends, and need to find a solution in order to avoid this in the future. Does anybody have suggestions / best practices for reducing the amount of calls?

We recently untilized a email program to send an email to 200,000 leads. On that day we received over 81,000 API requests, which is more than 10x of our daily average. The next day we received over 100,000 and the day after that we received over 50,000. Can someone let me know what constitutes an API request (opens, clicks, data value change, etc.) and where these setting can be viewed in Marketo? I am hoping to find out how these calls can be customized or possibly removed to better suit our needs. Would batching greatly reduce the amount of calls, and what are the disadvantages of doing so?

I look forward to suggestions.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Can someone let me know what constitutes an API request (opens, clicks, data value change, etc.)

None of those constitute an API request. Those are all internal activities.

Do you have some kind of external (and ill-architected) forms integration using the API? Some other 3rd-party bridge that is closely linked to individual end-user activities?

[Anonymous]

@sanfordwhiteman - We do have a third party vendor that connects our Salesforce with Marketo. Right now, we do not sync directly to Salesforce but instead use this vendor to send data from SFDC to Marketo. We also use a webhook to send data from Marketo to Salesforce. A lot of our campaigns are using "request campaign".

What we did notice is that anytime we do large email sends, that's when we run into the API exceeding the limit. We've tried using email program 24 hour send as well as batch campaign send. But it always exceed the API limit. Not sure why this is happening.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You'll have to explain exactly what end-user events are directly interacting with SFDC (and thus causing your integration layer to consume Marketo API calls).

A send that results in 100,000 click-tracked links and 500,000 pageview still doesn't use a single API call. What else is being tracked, outside of/in addition to standard Marketo actions? Some third-party tracking pixel?

Im any case I can't recommend strongly enough that you use Marketo's built-in (and mature) SFDC sync.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

For the sake of clarification: do you mean your Marketo API limit or your Salesforce API limit?

[SanfordWhiteman]

(50,000 would be a really low SFDC limit, but I guess it's good to clarify!)