How do I prevent merges from firing off trigger campaigns?

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Hey all,

I was about to clean up our database and merge some dupes that are sitting around, but remembered that we have a campaign with a trigger of Data Value Changes that fires off when a field value is updated. How do I prevent my deduplication efforts from causing that trigger campaign to fire off left and right?

My understanding is that merges aren't tracked in the activity history as Changed Data Value, so the trigger shouldn't fire technically speaking, but I just want to be safe.

Thanks,

Andy

[Anonymous]

Were you able to test this out? I want to go and find a lead I have recently merged to see if the activity history captured a Changed Data Value.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

When I test it out, I get the Change Data Value activities as well as Merged activity, however, I didn't get an email as expected from the Change Data Value activity, so I'm not 100% sure if that was a one off or if that'll be the case for all merged leads.

EDIT: Just tested it again and got an email this time. I guess this means no more deduping till I can figure this one out.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4 · Accepted solution]

I spent a lot of time figuring out this and other similar issues with the "data value changes" trigger.

Every time a merge happens only a certain number of fields on the master record gets updated (some fields might be blocked from updates, some fields might simply be blank on the dupe record, etc), you can see the number of fields updated in the activity log

and the list of fields that were updated by the merge in the log details

Marketo will log "data value change" activity for all the fields listed in the merge details, these activity logs will usually be listed before the actual merge activity log.

Naturally, only the updated fields will activate a campaign with "Data value changes" trigger. This means that not all merges will trigger this type of campaigns, but many might.

If you want to block merges from triggering your "Data value changes" campaign, do the following:

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Thank you!

I was trying to work through the constraints as well, but wasn't able to get anything to show up in the drop down list for Reason or Source, so I didn't know if it was expecting a string or ID or something else altogether.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Yep, for whatever reason constraints in the data value changes do not show anything, I analyzed A LOT of log details and pretty much all of the merge generated data value changes have the word "merge" in them, I tested it and it worked