Help! I've inherited hundreds of Marketo fields and I can't clean them up

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

Our company was recently acquired and our Marketo org was merged into our parent company's. The parent company does not have any systematic naming convention and I am trying to apply a naming convention across all fields. This is easy for our company because we are creating the fields from scratch, however for all 500+ other fields I can't edit the name (if it's not synced with SalesForce) or 'Hide' it because it is currently 'in use'. I reached out to Marketo support and they told me that deactivating/archiving the relevant asset will NOT bring the field 'out of use' and that I will need to remove the reference from each and every field asset in order to change the name. That's crazy!

Has anyone figured out how to change field names in bulk?

[Edward_Unthank_]

I have not found one.

I'm familiar with your problem, but the usual solution is to keep it clean from the start instead of going through and removing all field references after they've been in use elsewhere.

I've been working on a Marketo Power User tool that can do at least some of the steps of this much faster than a human, but the problem with changing field names is that you'll need to un-build smart campaigns that could be in active use, rename, and then re-build the smart campaigns.

If you're coming up against that amount of work, I think it'd be a good time to audit the whole usage of fields altogether, and kill off a considerable list of them. If you kill off unnecessary fields, then you can at least prioritize your work so you don't have to worry about being delicate with fields that won't exist after the project.

The analysis I might run would be to check for (1) field usage from Marketo assets and (2) field completeness based on the database. You can either do a full-database export if that's not much, or you can run a random sample of ~1,000 leads and get percentage field completion from that representative sample.

Edward Unthank | Founder, Etumos

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply, Edward! Truly shocking that we can't edit the field name easily given how sophisticated Marketo is.

[Edward_Unthank_]

Agreed. I suspect that a long time ago Marketo baked in the actual field names into the code of smart lists and flow steps, instead of the field unique IDs, and that's an enormous amount of reprogramming to change all of those references in all client instances to be the unique IDs of the fields instead of the actual field names. They've learned since then, though, hence the ability to rename landing pages and emails—in those cases, we're looking at the secondary description, not the actual unique ID for the assets.

Edward

[Josh_Hill13]

I don;t think the tool was designed for database experts, it was designed for marketers!

You can hide old fields if you want.

@Ed - let me know when your tool is ready or if you need testers.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi All,

Once you have hidden useless fields, you can ask support to super-hide them (they will diseappear from your view).

You can also vote here:

-Greg

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Unfortunately not too much to add here other than to confirm what everyone else has said. Edward Unthank​ (I hope I picked the right one.. there are like 10 of you!), very interesting thought as to why we can't rename -- similarly to how we used to be unable to rename programs, folders, assets, etc. Best of luck, Alex!