Getting creative in tracking known engagement across large amounts of content

[Dan_Stevens_]

Our global website (including the individual country websites) is pretty massive: over 30,000 pages.  Up until now, we create a Marketo program for each group of main content pages.  For example, if we have a gated whitepaper that's being promoted on our global website and 23 country websites, a single Marketo program is used to track this engagement (the "clicks link on webpage" trigger uses "contains" logic to track the portion of the PDF filename that's consistent on all pages). 

We now want to track engagement beyond the main content pages - for example, for every video that appears on our site (which is not gated).  We have about 300 unique/active videos.  Since we use program membership/program status as the primary attribute to track engagement, can you think of a more scalable approach that would allow us to track known engagement across all of our videos, aside from creating a 1:1 mapping of Marketo program to unique video?

For reference, this is the structure of each "video" program:

[Justin_Norris1]

Hey Dan Stevens​,

If programs are the unit of attribution, and if you want to have attribution on the level of each individual video, then it seems you would need a program for each video. (That is, until Marketo implements program-level variables that are unique to each person, which I know is something that was being considered, although who knows when we might see it.)

The only way of scaling it that occurs to me might be with trigger tokens, but since the Brightcove video is a custom activity and not a web page that won't work.

Are you analyzing attribution in RCE or another system?

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Justin Norris | Perkuto​

[Rachel_Noble]

Yikes, yep you definitely don't want a 1:1 program-to-video bijection. Do you have to track the successes via program successes for individual videos in order to obtain ROI reporting in RCE (or some other platform)?

If not, maybe you can build a single (or a few) tracking program(s) where members who watch the videos and then meet success criteria are marked as successes and then added to a specific list. If you're connected to BI or another reporting tool it would be easier to track successes at scale, but you could also look at the lists themselves for counts.

[Justin_Norris1]

The root challenge I see is that there is no dynamic way to identify in a flow step which video was viewed (that triggered the campaign) based on a custom activity property.

So you would be creating/updating separate smart campaigns anyways to add people to lists I think, which I feel is basically same amount of work as cloning a program.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Thanks for the input Justin and Rachel - and what I was afraid of.  I think we'll just deploy this moving forward - for all new videos - rather than build programs for any existing one where the video doesn't already have a program associated with it.

[Rachel_Noble]

Good call! Or you could hire a summer intern to knock out the old programs.

[Dan_Stevens_]

The other item we need to take into consideration is the number of additional trigger campaigns this will require.  As we all know, it's important to minimize these so as not to negatively affect overall performance (and issues that can result - like long delays before trigger campaigns actually fire).

[Justin_Norris1]

Dan Stevens​

I agree that is a concern.

I would also consider setting up the smart lists adding leads to the programs as scheduled batches instead to avoid the extra system load (using the Has Views Brightcove Video filter with the same video ID constraint and a filter excluding current members of the program, and then setting it to run daily).

This should serve the same purpose and work fine as long as that level of reporting lag is acceptable. However, if you need to stamp additional fields for real-time sales enablement though (as I think you might do), that could be a problem.

It's a pity trigger tokens don't work for custom activities yet.

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Justin Norris | Perkuto​​