Just do it! Marketo so-called minor missing features

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Dear Marketo PM,

I know Christmas is over, but still we are in January and I decided to write that post with the hope that it would be read and taken care of, for good. It's about that long list of apparently minor things that at the end of the day, dramatically impair the productivity and, even worse, induce user errors.

As any one who is a little active on the community, I very often bump into some repetitive questions about the exact same issues. What's really frustrating is that all of these issues are in the Idea section, some of them have been there for 5 years or more. Each of them, taken alone, seems minor, but when you gather them all together, you discover, as I did, that is sums up to a significant amount of frustration and wasted time for regular users.

Of course, this list is not exhaustive, and obviously subjective. I have deliberately left out key features that would indeed represent significant improvements but also be changes in the functionalities of the software. Instead, I concentrated here on these "minor" things that impact our day-to-day operation of the core product but which fix would not change what we can do with Marketo. Of course again, I'll add on any other missing "minor" feature readers point to me. I also encourage the readers to vote for all the ideas listed here and express their willingness to have them fixed.

Here they are:

1-Error-drivers and time-waster all at once (yes, it is that bad!):

1. The lack of a recycle bin, that may drive someone to destroy in a second minutes, even hours of work or precious lead data. See opened in 2013.
2. The missing undo feature, that would save you from an erroneously deleted flow step or hazardous modification to an asset. See opened in 2011.
3. The absence of an efficient testing mode for smart campaigns and programs: . It was in fact opened in 2013, here and erroneously declared as "already have it".
4. The impossibility to schedule trigger campaigns to turn on of off, which leads for instance a visitor to receive a auto-responder email for an event that is passed. See , opened in 2014
5. The impossibility to schedule the automated swap of a landing page See , opened in 2015 (Thx 73d01bc0cfa35844474b95476b51302a14033627), for the same use case as above : when the event is over, I would like the form LP to be replaced by a non form LP.
6. The impossibility to leverage program tags & channels in "member of program" filter. Try to create a smart campaign that adds 10 score points to every attendee to any webinar in the instance. You can leverage naming conventions... if your users comply with them. Truth is, it's very likely you will end up forgetting one of these webinars. , opened in 2014, thx 0cc6322922f7c1a67f01a58cd7316a94fba97f81 and
7. Not changing automatically the follow-up form when cloning a program:  , opened in in 2016
8. Not changing automatically the program in program related reports when cloning the program:  , opened in 2015
9. Impossibility to see where tokens are being used: opened in 2014 (thx 54930) and yet, Marketo tells you when you cannot delete a token because it’s in use
10. The way URL clicks are detected, that require that users enter URL fields or tokens without the "http://" at the beginning. This is very error prone as users frequently forget about that. Super Users and admins often have to double check emails and edit them to correct these. This adds to the absence of control on URL values (URL fields and program tokens) that creates all the conditions for frequent non working URLs and absence of click detection (often too late, the email is gone). See    (2013) and
11. The impossibility to lock down smart lists, that enables some inexperienced user to change them and create trouble and failure in all the instance. See posted in 2013
12. The total absence of AUTOMATED UTM tagging on email links, that makes the utm tagging process painful and very error prone. See , posted in 2013, and ba271decb1e093a213347402815477c14f8176d2's most recent one
13. The lack of automated exclusion for people who partially unsubscribed from some specific content type , which often lead users to completely forgetting these exclusions and make the use of preference centers hazardous.
14. The need to always reference campaign and programs by their name, instead of having a straightforward "this campaign" or "this program" reference in filters, triggers and flow steps. This is possible today only on certain, limited, cases and we need this across the board to significantly reduce errors. See, posted in 2016 (Thx Dory Viscogliosi)
15. The possibility to change ID's in template editable zones without any warning, drive to severe loss of content (potentially hundreds of emails). See , posted in 2016 (and here for a workaround that may take hours to applyChanging the ID of an editable zone in a template leading to severe loss of content)
16. The necessity to set the advanced wait steps in the instance time zone, and not in the user's one, leading to risk that the time difference is not correctly computed. See (Thx e45b854943b7d76d00fcfcfd3e52ed73788dfd9b )
17. The impossibility to delete the 2 example revenue cycles, that, in turn, prevent the hiding of unused fields, leading users to erroneously put these fields in smart campaigns. See
18. When making a field hidden in a form, the "Prefill" setting is left to "enabled" by default. Users often forget to disable it, which drives the hidden field to ignore captured values if the lead is cookied. See
19. The lack or real handling of enum/picklist fields that would automate form build up and enable to limit (or not) the creation of bad values, as well as the lackof possibility to control values imported in Marketo. See (Thx Jonathan Wu ) and .

2-The time-wasters:

In addition to the speed of the product it-self (some simple queries even on a 50k or 200k DB can take minutes to return a result) See (Thx c3fe9112321230d5eee5edffd64ff2ec9f973314 and also Iryna Zhuravel for pointing this out) here is a list of issues that make us waste operating time:

1. Poor Email & LP sorting & filtering capabilities in design studio. The initial idea that enable to see all assets and mass reapprove them was great, but obviously, it has only been half implemented. Get to an instance where 20 templates are in use and 1400 emails have been produced and try to reapprove a series after a template modification and you will love this one , opened in 2014 by ba271decb1e093a213347402815477c14f8176d2 and also opened in 2015 (thx Shannan Garrett Cooper). The mass approval should also be enhanced so that it's possible to filter and finally have a "select all" that can select more than 30 assets at a time to launch a mass approval (see , thx Frank Breen). Mass unapproving assets would be great also (see , Thx Cecile Maindron). And also, it should be possible to sort on the Draft last update date (the "update date" field being that of the approved version). See (Thx Dan Stevens.) and (Thx Robb Barrett)
2. The fact that it is impossible to change the template of an email: , opened in 2013 (Thx Amber Hobson ) and, more recently (2014)
3. And the same for landing pages, of course: , opened in 2011, or alternatively, the possibility to replace a  landing page with a new one based on a new template. thx Ari Echt
4. The impossibility to sort on all fields in views:  opened in 2011, but also , (Thx Alex Stanton), here and
5. "Used By" links not opening in new window. If you have ever tried to remove the usage of a field, for instance, you have hit this one, that forces you to reload Marketo pages tens of times. See : , opened in 2014. And while you are there, please make it possible to use also links in activity logs, such as proposed here: and there and everywhere such links are displayed (on lists, smart lists, forms, landing pages, emails ...)
6. On that same topic, it should also be possible to export the list of places where a field is used by. See (Thx Ana Berger ) and
7. The impossibility to create Local Assets Within a Folder Directly, meaning you have to drag and drop them if you want to keep your programs ordered: , opened in 2014 Could even be considered as a bug...
8. The impossibility to cut, copy & paste filters and flow steps, both within a smart campaign and across smart campaigns and smart lists: , opened in 2012
9. The impossibility to deactivate all smart campaigns within a Program or a Folder at one time: , opened in 2012, and its counterpart, the impossibility to activate all smart campaigns at once (see , opened in 2015)
10. No possibility to approve and Send as One Action: (Thx Dory Viscogliosi) and more recently  , opened in 2015, Thx Jeff Smith. No possibility to send samples of multiple emails (e.g. all emails in a program) in bulk (see , thx a8534ed5846a8337320f2339b9490afdffaeb3d6 ).
11. The absence of field API names when field is selected in Field Management:, opened in 2015, thx Valerie Armstrong
12. All the click that are required when you want to run a manual flow step again : , opened in 2015
13. The lack of any way to enforce naming convention for programs, that drives users and admin crazy when they have to do some maintenance or heavy cleansing work in an instance. See   (2015) and https://nation.marketo.com/community/champion/blog/2015/07/20/clean-up-your-marketo-why-you-need-to-... (thx 1856838dfc96cca108f28566cfadbecc5c55ac92)
14. Inability to view and change form settings without editing the form. See , opened in 2015(Thx Abby Ryan)
15. The impossibility to clone and move tokens across folders ( ) posted in 2015
16. The missing "clone to same program" that would reduce the number of clicks when cloning assets, opened in 2014 here: (Txh Cecile Maindron)
17. The inadvertent creation of drafts in hundreds of assets each time you want to look at the code of a template, that leads to wondering whether or not you should reapprove them, spend useless time comparing the draft with the approved and finally spend another tens of minutes reapproving all assets. See , and , all created in 2016
18. The impossibility to easily swap snippets on landing pages (and emails ?). See added in 2014
19. The need for a better way to manage MSI emails, as proposed here in 2014 (Thx 6545c3d5a354935120463405dca48a46c63f3ee9) and also the possibility to schedule publishing and unpublishing. See (2016, Thx 584833f96f6f99df36e27c05bbb2a0ff56de0df7), (Posted in 2013) and (Posted in 2013) as well as this one (Posted in 2014, Thx 6545c3d5a354935120463405dca48a46c63f3ee9)
20. We also need to make sure the sales do not spend too much time navigating in folders in Sales Insight, as proposed there   and there in 2015.
21. That weird little bug that is also a nice time waster, when you make a change to you email templates that are in used in a nurturing program  https://nation.marketo.com/community/product_and_support/blog/2016/01/25/changes-to-email-templates-...
22. The impossibility to open the admin in a new window ( ) Thx Sofia Fogelfors and 600627fc64a6d68ee5543f5908014825c5b88e31EDIT: this is now possible with a CTRL-click or a right click.
23. The impossibility to sort files as we would in the design studio -> files section and also to filter them. See here: (Thx Kara Pietrykowski)
24. The impossiblity to exclude Marketo users from communication limits (see dated 2014, thx Cristan Hutto ) and more broadly the impossibility to adjust the communication limits to the level of relationship (see dated 2015, Thx Elizabeth Robichaud) as well as to exclude some lists from the communication limits. See (Thx Tara Petre ) and (Thx c59e8a3a73fdd1f124e2c7873b7b73af1eb4d197 ) and also (Thx Nicolle Chase )
25. Remove the autocomplete on email schedule time dropdown or replace it with a real picklist that lets you type in (see , dated 2016, thx Ryan Baker)
26. The impossibility to sort all columns, and specifically the custom ones, in views. See   (Thx Alex Stanton).
27. The impossibility to use email name as a constraint for sales email filters and triggers, that drive endless and necessarily mistaken lists, especially in an international environment, to a point where these filters and triggers are almost impossible to use. Could be also in the bug section. See , date 2014, althoug It think there was an older idea that I could not retreive.
28. The impossibility to mass select and move programs or assets at once in the marketing activities or the lead database. See , posted in 2016, thx Olga Khadieva
29. The need to edit CSS (which means to know how to do it in the first place ) for simple form formatting things such as displaying the check box on the left of the text instead of the right. See posted in 2016 (Thx f0b526d952f661e4f12d4f7397e38fcfa0bc7b8f)
30. The impossibility to change the type of programs a channel applies to after creating it, and before using it. See , 2013, thx Michelle Tiziani
31. Limitations to the global calendar, such as no handling of holidays, nor the possibility to hide week-ends, or the impossibility to enter a calendar entry without moving to a program focus. See (4b17b20fd000231d086287e055494b3afd402db3), posted in 2015 or , posted in 2014 (Thx Marie-Pier Godere) or else the impossibility to see recurrent campaigns in the calendar. See   posted i 2015 (Thx Takehiro Masaki).
32. The fact that, when adding choices in a flow step, they are added on the top of the other choices, while most of the time, we want them at the bottom, as we are dealing with choices from the first priority down to the lowest priority ones. See (Thx Robb Barrett).
33. We would also need a much quicker way to expand or collapse sections of the marketing activities left pane, i.e. the ability to have a right-click -> expand all and right click->collapse all on the folders and programs.
34. The fact that seconds and milliseconds are not visible in the lead activity logs, making the lines ill-ordered and therefore sometime very difficult to interpret. See (Thx 540d4c2f8c5d77cec876bb0eafd9dbdb40b95526).
35. The impossibility on certain screen to access the Marketo circle menu, so if you have closed other tabs, you have no choice but reconnect. See (Posted in 2016, Thx Robb Barrett)
36. The impossibility to create custom fields on Accounts and Opportunities without the help of support, while these objects are now available through the API. See , created in 2013.
37. The frequent issues which drop lists not showing up when building smart lists. e.g. (Thx Robb Barrett PRD)
38. The repeated error we make when we clone a smart campaign because there is no default value in the "Clone to" field. See (Thx Nicholas Manojlovic)
39. The need for multiple click when we want to jump from editing an LP to editing the form. See   (Thx Robb Barrett)
40. The impossibility to edit an email from the preview pane. See (Thx Robb Barrett PRD)
41. The impossibility to run a lead action from the lead detail view: , posted in 2013
42. The impossibility to share Design Studio form, email or lnading page folders which prevents cloning programs between workspaces. See, (Thx Dan Stevens.), (Thx 9a6cff02ffd96ece4fd275a6628048308120f17a) and (Thx 429a3b00c04df8e5ab80b97b236aaa7a14e3374e)
43. The need to deactivate all smart campaigns before archiving a folder and its programs. See (Thx Nadine Regan ) and more broadly the impossibility to mass activate/deactivate smart campaigns. See (b72dc7c055dafea73f8d6d741b9dcccbeca3e4dd )
44. Missing some basic UI function such as the "Select all" option in the folder sharing dialog box. See
45. The impossibility to sort fields in the view when creating the view. One needs first to approve the view, have it displayed and only then he/she will be able to reorder the fields. See   (Thx Axel Baran)
46. When reviewing forms, it's impossible to know what fields and tokens a form uses without editing it. So See (Thx Robb Barrett ) and
47. Accessing the audit trail for any object would be a huge time saver. See (Thx Devraj Grewal )
48. The impossibility to trigger or filter on specific score changes. See , (Thx e20eb9502ba847c022fcd5091e8e073a3dc4bf1c) and
49. Make it possible to move image and files from one workspace to another. See . The current process for achieving this is really painful.
50. The possibility to select a segment, rather than having to scroll trough every segment when previewing a email with Dynamic content. See (Thx Karl-Heinz Thaler )
51. The impossibility to force a refresh of the stats on the "streams" tab in an engagement program. See (Thx Devraj Grewal )
52. The time it takes to manage modules in email editor 2.0 is really a time waster. See
53. In the form editor, when adding a new field, the field selector only enables to search by the field starting letters. Please make it a real search box. See
54. The limitation on order of fields in the form editor: not being able to set fields or rich text areas after the progressive profiling area, nor being able to add a text zone after the submit button are huge limitations. See   (Thx Edward Masson) and and also
55. Have the "Powerball" open Marketo sections in new tabs by default. See (Thx Christina Zuniga).

3-The error-drivers:

1. The impossibility to remove the "View as web page" flag from email creation dialog, while you are using the equivalent system token in your template, leading some email to have it twice... opened in 2016
2. The difficulty to detect in which instance you are, whether in a sandbox of not, see (Thx David Mason) Fixed  in Spring '16
3. Separate "Approve Draft" and "Discard Draft" so that it's harder to confuse them. See (Thx af38d93b249400d01b5c0bc433f1e92ed2554f01)
4. The impossibility to fire campaigns once per email opened or other events. See   posted in 2016 and which makes us count false values, or else end up with crazy scores.
5. The absence of warning if one approves an email program which email still have drafts. See , posted in 2016 (Thx 96d293711ac19d0fd55894ec690a62603caf4de3)
6. The impossibility to set ALT tags on images when we upload them, so that this ALT is used everywhere when the image is used. See (Thx Geoff Krajeski )

4-The features that just do not work as they should (a.k.a bugs):

1. Inability to move lists and smart lists (smart campaigns can be moved) , opened in 2013
2. Impossibility to delete overriden tokens in certain circumstances:  How to delete an Overridden token?, opened in 2015, thx Stijn Heijthuijsen. The idea is here: (Thx 9928d0ba087bb13df62b94ae429cfd659e22fdde)
3. Impossibility to delete a program if it contains a form and the form is in use in the same program.  Trying to delete program, but it's saying that the asset is in use within the program, opened in 2014, thx Dory Viscogliosi
4. Impossibility to delete a program when 2 smart campaigns in the program reference each other (with a "Request Smart Campaign" or a "Remove from Flow" flow steps). See Impossible to delete a program: a new case and
5. The Marketo navigator that does not refresh correctly when clicking on a "used by" link. Not found this idea, but the problem is easy enough to replicate.
6. The incomplete click detection on PDF links when some one clicks on many PDF links in the same page. See (Thx 5e699d144921ed4fe1071f12334d48d967fef537 and Sanford Whiteman)
7. The fact that the field mapping section is not updated when new fields are added (see , thx Alex Stanton) which really let the admin user think he is loosing his mind.
8. The fact that the velocity script rendering in preview depends from the user locale, instead of being rendered as if it was sent from a smart campaign. See (2016)
9. PURLS that consider leads as anonymous instead of recognizing them if they have not been "cookied". See Undesired behavior when using Personalized URLs PURLs (Thx Dan Stevens)
10. The impossibility to choose in which workspaces the field orgnizers should be created. see
11. The fact that "Export" functions only export incomplete information. See or
12. The fact that some default settings cannot be changed once the instance is live: See   and
13. The email editor can break if the email name is too long. yet, there is no limitation to the length of the email name. See (Thx Emily Higgins )

5-The admin-trouble-makers that can even cause compliance issues:

1. No possibility to deactivate a user without deleting it: , opened in 2015
2. Impossibility to delete Custom Field: opened in 2010 and marked "already have it", but not yet delivered, and reopened in 2014 (see ) thx Karen Black  and again in 2016 ( ) Thx Cecile Maindron.
3. The impossibility to export user list, roles and workspaces access, which is needed in large orgs for documentation and auditing purpose. See (Thx Mike Truong)
4. The impossibility to easily export asset information for documentation and impact analysis. See   (Thx Courtney Grimes ), , ,
5. the need for some enhancements in the user deactivation process, in order to make it safer and easier. See , , and .
6. The impossibility to get a rapid overview about which program are sync'ed to SFDC and which are not. See
7. The audit trail, as welcome as it was when released, is still missing some important capabilities. See , (Thx Pavel Plachky) , (Thx Courtney Grimes) , (Thx Roxann McGlumphy) , and .

6-The consultant (a.k.a Marketo Ambassadors All Around the Market or MAAAM's ) speed reducers:

1. Linked Language and Locale settings in the My Account screen : , opened in 2015
2. The need to separate email and login at user creation: , opened in 2013 and also under different form here : so that one can have multiple accounts with the same email address.
3. The lack of serious tools to manage the data schema and fields, such as getting simply a complete information about the fields (see , created in 2015, thx Michael Langellotti)
4. The possibility to connect and disconnect 2 instances without help from Support. See   (Thx Jose Tarzian)

There are 50+ points listed in this page, and 60+ ideas, and it's really impossible for a normal Marketo user to run a working session without bumping into many of them, and this many times a day, every day. People do change their cars because they do not like the radio or because of some repetitive glitches in the windscreen wiper. They may as well change their marketing automation system because after a while they tend to see more the defaults above than all the good things that Marketo does for them.

-Greg

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

This is excellent, Greg!!! we are spending so much time battling all these issues, and don't even get me started on RCA/RCE, after we had to wait for a good hour for a report we needed ASAP (Marketo just won't load it) some folks in our org started talking about switching to a different MAP platform. Now that a certain CRM company is very actively peddling their very own "native integration" MAP to their customer base, Marketo should really step up their game with this

I've been particularly frustrated with RCE lately, here are just a few things:

• - heat grids in email analysis reports are amazing, but they show data only in CST time zone, so when we were preparing a report on email marketing in different regions I had to export the data in excel, shuffle the time zones around and use third-party tools to built a heat grid for each region, all that while using a premium MAP tool
• - having dashboards in RCE is pretty useless without this feature
• - many good points here: having to wait for 24 hours for data to sync to RCE is simply ludicrous; not being able to rename reports (technically you can rename them, but it breaks subscriptions to those reports); better documentation on model reports and formulas used in them, even Marketo ninjas are not 100% clear on those Documentation on RCA and modeler

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Iryna,

Voted for these 3 ones as well.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Adding this one:

Greg

[Anonymous]

Excellent list! It's amazing to me how long some of these seemingly no-brainer improvements to the core product have been begged for on the Community; instead, I feel like we see tons of 'nice to have' updates that have little to no impact on our day-to-day/practical use of the platform (ie 3+ years of asking before we got mobile-ready landing pages).

It's also amazing to me (and a little discouraging) as I read through this, how many of these issues I have just come to live with and stop asking for.

A couple other long time asks on my list are:

- More options on permissions (ie a workflow setup that would allow for sending campaigns to an approver; only allowing certain users to create certain assets in certain places in the application, etc)

- For "campaign is requested" triggers, a way to show which campaigns are requesting that trigger (right now we are blind to that fact once a campaign is set up with that trigger)

Looking forward to some (any!) of the things on this list getting checked off!!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nathan,

This is the very reason why I created this post: taken alone, each of these "no-brainer" points seems minor. What's is it difficult to leave with is the accumulation.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Agreed! Very valuable points!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

In fact, my experience after a few tens of Marketo implementations is that enhanced marketing productivity is the very first benefit that teams see and appreciate, almost immediately, while the other benefits take much more time to come in.

These "minor" issues come in the way and that is really a pitty.

-Greg

[Kasey_Schmitz1]

This is a fantastic list and I agree with all the points. In fact, because Marketo is still lacking this seemingly simple and basic functionality along with other issues, we have been prompted to seriously consider switching to Pardot at the end of our contract term this year.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Kasey Schmitz,

Do not think Pardot or any other product on the market does a better job. Pardot functionality set is quite narrower than Marketo's, especially in your organization (That I happen to know quite well ). You would for instance loose the workspaces and the program cloning capabilities.

We can continue this conversion privately, if you want. Just follow me or email me at gregoire@inficiences.com,

-Greg