Marketo is lagging behind

[Diego_Lineros2]

After 6 or more years using Marketo, I can say Marketo is starting to dissapoint. Every release is slimmer than the previous, or out of focus.

Why I am saying this?

• Basic missing features that for years are being requested are still missing. In the era of AI you can't even evaluate a date token without calling a webhook.
• The reporting is outrageous, many promisses but nothing happens, we are still with a 2000 style reporting.
• Sky... ohh Sky, many years of promises and it is still an useless interface with little or none advantage.
• We are still dependant on smart lists based on stored data or triggers, not in future inference or likelihood.
• Still the eternal problem of duplications...

I can go on and on ... but Marketo, its time to wake up!

[Ronnie_Duke2]

There are so many platforms that do parts of what Marketo does, better, but the unfortunate truth is that no single platform (in my opinion) has all of the engrained capabilities that makes Marketo...Marketo. That's the shame though, because that's what makes it feel like we're being held hostage. There are a TON of things that we continue to have to put up with just because for most of us there is no viable alternative without losing functionality we know and love.

Here are some things I see that should be quick wins given the modern technology that is available today that would at least show good faith that Marketo is trying to keep up with the usability features for marketers that we all know are possible:

- Drag and drop landing page builder (at the very least incorporate modules like emails. It's almost comical that emails have more flexibility now in Marketo than Landing Pages...)

- Find & replace in Landing Page Template editor (it's currently different than the email editor for some reason?)

- Better support for SVG's

- View all submissions for a form in chronological order (form submit log)

- Form actions without having to create a separate campaign

- Alert to not send an email from a smart campaign if it’s in draft mode

- Edit filenames in file manager

- Move files between folders without having to delete and re-upload

- Edit text files (css & js) directly within file manager

- View a contact and easily see what lists, smart lists, and campaigns they belong to without having to scrub through the activity log

- Approve snippets without having to close, refresh and THEN approve draft

I think it's simple things like this that cause most people to feel like Marketo is dating itself. Just my humble opinion 🙂

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Your statement is quite interesting because I feel no different about any amazing products that I admire greatly. There are always ways that a product can be improved (and that's why I love the profession). But, nobody is a hostage and there is always choice. The sum of the parts is what make platforms/ecosystems invaluable. Quick example that should resonate is the iPhone. One of the most successful technology products ever built. However, you'd probably characterize their user base as "trapped" within the ecosystem. I can quickly name for you hundreds of features the iPhone/iOS could have (I'm also sure Apple is well aware) but their product team has to make tough prioritization calls each development cycle. I still love their products and have no concerns with them making those tradeoffs on my behalf in order to provide a solid product. 

No different in B2B software. The list of requests you shared above are not all "quick wins" and would need to be prioritized by the product team alongside the massive list of things that thousands of customers (and hundreds of thousands of users) ask for. Apple doesn't show you how they prioritize and I wouldn't expect Marketo to do so either.

Disclaimer: I've moved on and now lead product at NextRoll (Marketo customer and partner). 

[Ronnie_Duke2]

Thanks, Justin, I appreciate your perspective. I guess my point was looking at Marketo in the context of other marketing tools and technology that seem to be coming out by the day. Do I expect that Marketo is going to keep up with every new shiny thing that comes out? Of course not. But, even with your iPhone example, Apple still releases fairly major new features or enhancements every year. I've been an iPhone user since V1 and I remember being frustrated about lack of copy/paste, MMS, background apps, etc but Apple was well aware of those things the community wanted and rolled those features out within just a couple years. Contrast that with Guided Landing Pages that got released in 2015 (I think) and still do not have drag-n-drop/module capabilities? We know the functionality is there since it's been in emails 2.0 for years. 

I'm not saying these enhancements are just a flip of a switch, and "quick win" means different things to different people. I guess the frustration is that when I look at the release notes every quarter, I'm often disappointed that the majority of the updates are to their up-sell apps (which we're always trying to get sold on), and seemingly very little is focussed on the core platform new features. Even with Marketo Sky (when it's not buggy), none of the things I listed above seem to have changed.

Maybe I'm wrong – maybe Marketo is innovating the core platform in ways I'm not noticing. But when users like me are dealing with the same issues that they've been dealing with for 5+ years, it's that perception of lack of innovation that I think we're all frustrated about. 

Will I keep using Marketo? Of course – because it does do certain things better than any other platform out there (IMO). But even though the net result is usually better than other solutions, the path it takes to get there sometimes doesn't leave me feeling "excited" to use Marketo. That is what I meant by feeling held hostage. All we want in the end, is to feel like Marketo is always working toward making our lives easier with the tools and functionality we use most. 

[Karyn_Hill]

As a small non-profit, there are things that can be done in Marketo by a developer (someone with more than my fumbling novice attempts) that we simply can't afford, and likely never will be able to. But we can get those things already built in Marketing Cloud, and while the cost is roughly the same, we don't have to pay extra for SSL, we won't have to pay extra for a dedicated IP when our volume is high enough to warrant one, and the people who are building the day-to-day emails from our templates have a much better experience. Journeys are easier for people to understand and use than campaigns in Marketo are. And the analytics are light-years easier to use than those in Marketo.

For a company who can have employees dedicated to Marketo and have developer experience, I suppose the experience is noticeably better. An awful lot of companies aren't in that situation, though. And 7 weeks, with still no resolution to a problem, is absurd.

It's not hard for Marketo's engineers to improve the editor so that it's easier to use and more flexible. It's a marketing program; email marketing should be among the top concerns. It's great to have flashy new things to play with but the fact is that a marketing program needs to be easy to use for a non-developer who just wants to structure their email in a way the developer never thought of. And it shouldn't take more than 7 weeks to resolve an issue with something happening in the program that shouldn't.

I miss Marketo, no doubt. But I really like how much easier Marketing Cloud is to use, even though it's not perfect. We can deal with it's imperfections far more easily than we can with those of Marketo.

[Jason_Steen]

I'm shocked to hear that I need to parse CSV data when calling Bulk Extracts. How is Marketo no using the industry standard of formatting API Responses in JSON? It's pretty frustrating to deal with such an immature company.

[Santosh_Wakode]

Marketo please provide API for following requirement.

We have one Email program and inside that we have two smart campaigns(announcement and newsletter). Currently we are sharing single email asset for both announcement and newsletter and due to that we are not getting correct report and analytics result. So that we tried to create separate asset for each daily announcement and newsletter using API.

But the main issue is even though we created new email asset for individual announcement / newsletter, FLOW step will have previous assigned email asset with email program and while scheduling it will send email with previous email asset body only and not with latest one. To send email with new we manually need to change FLOW step.

Is there any API provision like on the basis of programId, campaignId(announcement and newsletter) and email assetId we should change FLOW setting?

Please help because we are not getting expected result and solution from long time from Marketo.

[Austin_Coffman]

It's 2019, where is the drag and drop editor? Or Visual flow paths? Or ANY kind of advanced reporting???

Also, who charges for SSL???

[Grant_Booth]

I have to admit that getting charged for SSL, although a small charge compared to the overall contract, does sting. Security warnings on pages without SSL are now becoming standard across the web. It should be self-provisioning and default in new subscriptions. It's the kind of improvements they could use to justify that automatic contract increase at renewal...

[Karla_Haley6]

Marketo would be wise to encourage people to delelop on Marketo rather than try to do it all themselves. That's how SFDC has stayed ahead of the curve.

[Michael_Florin]

I have to agree to Diego's statement "Marketo is starting to disappoint". I feel that's perfectly worded.

We moved from Eloqua to Marketo in 2013. With conviction! We loved Marketo and its tokens and its program cloning and I've been a fiery Marketo ambassador ever since. But what has happened in the last years? To me it feels as if many features were released in version 1.0 but were never touched after that. The intentions were good, the initiatives founded in customer feedback, but the features missed critical updates to make them really, really good. Let's name some:

Engagement Programs - Good stuff, we use them heavily. But the Engagement Score doesn't work. At least if you're using programs within the engagement program (which I think you should).

Email Programs - okay. We are using them heavily as well.

Marketing Calendar - Man, this could have been great. But no program names on the calender? We just can't use it like that.

Email Insights - you can't subscribe to reports? Is this even out of beta?

MSI - did that get any update at all? Still program tokens don't render in Salesforce? It's so hard to convince sales to like MSI!

-------

And I deeply agree with Greg's response regarding the so-called minor missing features (Hello non-deleteable overridden tokens!). You can't say "We like it!" and then don't do anything about them for 5 years.

So, yes. I am disappointed too.

Michael

[Patrick_Cooney]

I just switched companies recently. My last company used Eloqua and my current company uses Marketo. I have to say that there were a handful of things that annoyed me, but overall, Eloqua was a great platform.

The reporting that Eloqua provides puts both Marketo (circa 2019) and Hubspot (circa 2017) to shame. Eloqua updated the editors in 2018 to be more contemporary. There is now a drag-and-drop responsive email editor and landing page editor. You still can't edit the HTML which bugged the heck out of me, but I will trade away my ability to edit HTML for the amazing reporting Eloqua provided.

I miss my Eloqua reporting.

[Grant_Booth]

Regarding the email program, I think it's a great example of how Marketo was struggling with its direction, and tried to hobble together a flashy new feature rather than continuing to improve on their core platform. It's useful primarily for two things: A/B testing and sending in time-zone. Why not focus on incorporating those things into smart campaigns instead? For example, a "Send A/B Test" flow step, or an "Emails in time zone" option in the Schedule tab of a smart campaign?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Justin Cooperman‌,

The truth is that it has been a long time Marketo has not released any of the top ranked ideas from this community, and we have been awaiting Sky and its promises for a very long time, especially with regards to the possibility Sky offers about fixing many of the small bugs that ruin our lives (https://nation.marketo.com/thread/30031-just-do-it-marketo-so-called-minor-missing-features and https://nation.marketo.com/thread/33692-marketo-salesforce-integration-needs-a-serious-overhaul-dont... are ow more that 3 months old). 

And the policy to make all significant upgrades chargeable is also very frustrating. E.g. MPI, while in the same time Marketo analytics and advanced reporting are so limited and old fashion.

Greg

[Diego_Lineros2]

Not only significant upgrades, minor ones too. They wanted to charge me to cap an event! an 8 year old requested feature!

[Casey_Grimes]

Greg, with all due respect, that's just not true.

The top ideas over the past few years (Local send times, capping event registrations, audit trail, subscribe to smart lists, flow step rules, scheduled trigger activation/deactivation) have been delivered--granted, you usually see maybe one to two of the big ones a year, but they do get shipped. 

Now, I'll argue those have all been feature ideas instead of bug/quality of use ideas, but you can't say the team isn't listening. I too would like to see a bug-focus release, but it's also hard to know without seeing the codebase how many of those are trivial fixes and how many actually require backend work (which as we all know with Marketo has been a slow but ongoing process--it's hard to rebuild an airplane mid-flight).

That said, I wouldn't necessarily be against Adobe doing some sort of bug bounty/hackathon day with its partners to help address some of this stuff where possible (wink wink, nudge nudge).

[Grant_Booth]

Also, let's not forget about the massive infrastructure and processing speed improvements that happened over the last couple of years. Remember how that smart list that now takes 5 seconds to load used to take 10 minutes? It hasn't been visible, so I don't think it's received the credit it deserves, but it's been a HUGE improvement.

[Glen_McMillan]

We are an agency, working with Marketo on behalf of our clients. We raised a support case for the Facebook Lead Ads integration being broken. After literally weeks of convincing Support that it wasn't a case of user error, they eventually admitted it was indeed a bug and escalated it to a L1 issue for their engineers to solve with Facebook. That was over a month ago. It's still broken and I know it's affecting multiple Marketo clients.

Having run software engineering and support teams myself, I do understand the challenges, but there is no excuse. This is an important feature that just outright does not work. The only conclusion I can draw is that engineering and support management isn't currently prioritising customer support.

[Justin_Eichelb1]

We had the same issue with Facebook and LinkedIN Lead Ads and have had zero assistance with Marketo support.

In december, we had an issue where it was taking 6 hours to import 14 records.  consistently.  Support gave us runaround for months. We had countless "Customer Success" meetings regarding the issue.  

Any answers we did receive didn't even revolve around the timeframes we we having the issues. 

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Hi Glen,

Over the last year Facebook has been going through many internal changes and policy shifts, as you may be aware from reading industry news. You're also probably aware that the primary area of concern has been how Facebook enables 3rd party data access (like the Marketo integration you're referencing). As a result of these developments, we've seen significant downstream impact to our integration points. There have been numerous API deprecations and changes (example: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/07/a-platform-update/), permission changes, privacy reviews, contract/agreement changes, etc. implemented by Facebook with very little notice to partners. 

I think we do have a handle on this and the good news is that your Marketo functionality should not be impacted. The Lead Ads ingestion issue you mentioned should also be resolved (reach out to your support rep again if you have any issues). Just wanted to add some color as to why this has been a challenge.

Justin

[Glen_McMillan]

Thanks Justin,

I appreciate your response. And I can empathise with the challenges in keeping the integration running with Facebook. I disagree however that "Marketo functionality should not be impacted". I'd consider a failure to capture leads from Facebook a core functional failure and high priority issue for all B2C clients.

What I don't understand is how identifying and resolving this issue can take two months when we've been told the case was escalated to P1. I'd also stress my frustration with it taking so long for Marketo to acknowledge this as an issue when integration issues with Facebook is known to Marketo's leadership.

Happy to share the case number with you if you'd like to see the history. Its current status is with Marketo.

Glen