Is it good to use "Activity Logged" as a filter to determine if a contact/Lead are engaged

[Tjones]

Does anyone use "Activity Logged" as a filter in a Smart List determine if a contact/lead is active or engaged or not? It seems problematic as it appears that a lot of things that have little to do with engagement are logged. I am working with an inherited instance of Marketo and there is a smart list of "All Marketable Persons - Active Past 12 Months" and it uses that as a filter (among others that are valid.)

Does anyone have a smart list to create a list engaged contacts they'd be willing to share?

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

I think you're talking about the "Activity was Logged" filter which is the SFDC filter and determines if there are any tasks or events at the activity level for a person or not. "Activity was Logged" filter only sees the "Tasks" and "Events" that exist in Salesforce. Anything else that shows up in the SFDC Lead/Contact's activity history is not seen by that filter unless it is also a task or event in Salesforce.

I don't think you should use that filter to determine if the person is engaged/active or not. You should rather be using lead activity filters - e.g., "Filled Out Form", "Visited Webpage", etc. in your SL to filter out people who're engaging with your marketing assets. Following is the SL configuration that we used in the past, FYR -

Basically, you'd want to include the filters for identifying any person activities logged as a result of their action v.s. the activity that was logged as a result of your marketing efforts, you'd not want to include Was Sent Email as that's not a good example of something that prospect engagement, it merely shows that you sent out an email. One more thing, since you'd be creating a SL that references the lead activity log, you should also be cognizant of Marketo's data retention policies for high volume and normal activities listed on this page here.

Please let us know if you have any questions. 

[Tjones]

That's what I thought thank you for confirming!

[Darshil_Shah1]

Cool! You're very welcome. 🙂

[schlesinger]

This is a good answer, but what if you wanted to connect it to possible activity happening off of email and the website. For example, I want to use it as "unsuspend" criteria to bring a contact back into the marketing system from Marketing Suspended because it can show that my sales reps have interacted with them even though they haven't received emails or visited the website, there is active engagement happening.

Would that be a good use case for it?

[Darshil_Shah1]

Thanks, @schlesinger and of course, the criteria for determining the engaged audience could vary from business to business, mosty it depends on how your teams function and what marketing/sales initiatives you’re driving. A conversation with sales teams is def. a good example of person engagement leading the sales team change their suspended status to False (in most cases, sales conversation is a better person engagement than visiting company  webpage, engaging with marketing emails, etc.). Also, I won't consider changing the suspending status to False w/o any active person engagement a good example to regard them as engaged/active.

[Vinay_Kumar]

Agreed with @Darshil_Shah1 comment. Using activity filters would be the correct approach to identify the active/inactive leads. You can try different activity filters with the correct logic to filter the leads as per your requirement.