How to pull value from Marketo custom object field value into a Marketo custom field ?

[rohanpat]

Hi All,

We are currently tracking some unique values in Marketo custom object fields. However, we are not able to use the same in report column as there has to be a Marketo custom field present. So the ask is if there is any way we can read the values from those Marketo custom object fields into a Marketo custom field?

Thank you,

Rohan

[Michael_Florin · Accepted solution]

Not possible. As you already said, the transport mechanism would need to be Velocity, but Velocity can only put values into emails, not into Change Data Value flow steps.

If you need the information only in reports, you could probably build Smart Lists ("Has Custom Object A with value B") and use these Smart Lists as Custom Columns in a People Performance Report. Just a thought.

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Velocity can only be used to output data into an email, not update data in custom /standard object fields. With that being said, what report are you building, or is it a smart list in the first place (as you're trying to pull in fields in the view)? Additionally, I'd advise you to clearly define your business case here first, and  then based on that determine if it would be beneficial to export the custom object data and then visualize it externally, or write custom object data to a marketo custom field (of course you'd need to use APIs or do list import for this) instead. Don't fall prey to XY problems. 🙂

[rohanpat]

Hi Darshil,

I have have edited the description, may be the details weren't clear enough earlier.

So the business case here is we have created Marketo custom objects for our event registrations (Cvent - Marketo integration) to understand how many net new contacts are created by registering to the event. However we are not able to pull those details (Event title and date of registration from Marketo custom object fields) in a column in smart lists or reports.

I thought of using tokens to write the values from Marketo custom object fields to Marketo custom fields but there is no provision in Marketo to create tokens for Marketo custom object fields.   

Does this clarify your doubts?

-Rohan

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I thought of using tokens to write the values from Marketo custom object fields to Marketo custom fields but there is no provision in Marketo to create tokens for Marketo custom object fields

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That’s right. And Michael’s and Darshil’s responses are the correct ones for this case. There’s no report within Marketo that displays CO fields as first-class objects.

(One reason for this is that Marketo COs were originally assumed to be copies of objects sourced from another system, so you’d use that system to report. Over time, people have made more robust use of COs but that original assumption of “you have this data somewhere else” is still baked in.)